RailsRumble Wrap-Up
We made it! 4 geeks, 48 hours, a last minute idea…..barely any internet - against all odds - we made it. When we started planning the RailsRumble competition, we were debating between 2 ideas; A new & improved task management system, and an online Rolodex with a very unique method of storing on & offline data as well as managing the relationship. 24 hours before we were set to begin, a new idea was hatched by a coworker of Joe Fiorini’s and we shifted gears to make it work.
The plan was to work from my Sun Room for the weekend - it turns out our location needed to be just as Agile as our development; TimeWarner has been upgrading the cable in our area for 2 weeks now, causing massive and lengthy outages. This weekend was no exception, the internet was down when the team arrived at 8pm. The competition officially started at 8pm on Friday, so we scrambled, I booked a room at a nearby Marriott (Thank you Marriot Points - the room cost us a total of $6) and we moved over to share the WiFi signal at the hotel.
Our next problem was that one of our team members had a conflict and could no longer make it. We discussed our options and made an emergency call to Jonathan Penn. Jonathan lives in Akron (Ohio) and had a small conflict with his band on Saturday night, but we worked it out and Jonathan cleared it with his wife and jumped in his car and drove to Erie.
With our team reassembled, we got to work; I setup our server, Joe started working on our template (Bettter-Bort - which lead to numerous Swedish Chef jokes and references) and our Javascript-guru and Designer, Josh Walsh, got cranking on our API Research & Design.
Jonathan arrived at around 1am, I think, and we started discussing our first issue - how do we get around Google’s limitations for their Google Maps API. This changed slightly again on Saturday morning, but our new solution kicks ass.
At 4am, we called it a night and got a few hours of sleep, grabbing breakfast at 8am. My father-in-law came to our rescue and opened up his office for us to work from downtown Erie. We grabbed the conference room for the day and got cracking on more code, design and server tuning all day Saturday until again heading to the hotel around 3am on Sunday morning. Breakfast again at 8am and back downtown to my FIL’s office. With just a small lunch break - we needed to get cracking to meet the 8pm deadline. At 7pm we realized we were all working on Macs and had yet to test in IE6/7. We got random friends to test and boy did we find issues - we were able to get all but 1 issue fixed by the deadline and launched our App at 8:01PM last night:
Ever wanted to meet up with some friends, but everybody lives in different corners of the city? Find a central meeting place using MeetInBetween.Us! Voting hasn’t opened for the Application yet - but feel free to use it and love it - we sure do and a lot of our Twitter Followers do as well. A big thank you to the rest of my team for their dedication and hard work, to my Father In Law for the office space, and to all of our wives for supporting us and letting us have this crazy Geek Weekend. To my team, I can honestly say I learned more about Rails and Javascript this weekend working with Joe, Josh and Jonathan than I learned from the numerous books, screencasts and tutorials I’ve read. I had even deployed 1 previous CRUD App on Rails, and now want to go rewrite it entirely with the lessons learned this weekend.
We can’t change anything with the App until voting closes, but we have plenty of features, fixes and changes we’ll be making once we can. I’ll send out a separate note when voting opens - but for now, it’s back to work and a healthy sleeping schedule.
