PREFACE: I didn’t post this because I got sidetracked realizing we could still update our rumble entry, but I still want to put it out there as it really was a learning experience.

This weekend I had the unique experience of contributing in the RailsRumble 2008 contest…. because of course I didn’t have enough to do with my customer work

Overall I think we came up with a great entry and given the fact that we only worked 48 hours on it I am really proud of what my team did. I want to thank Dan, Nate and Will for putting up with my insanity and exhastion. I couldn’t have asked for a better team.

That all being said… there are things I would do differently next time (aren’t there always?) and here are some lessons I learned for next years RailsRumble, MerbRumble (If that comes through) or any real short term app development.

Make Sure ALL Members of your Team are Prepared

Although this is really circumstancial in that this was a volunteer contest so it takes a backseat to work/life however I feel that we could have benefitted to a couple of preprep meetings over the couple of weeks before the competition. We had many document exchanges, but there is nothing like everyone getting on a call/webcam/campfire and just going over their understanding and making sure they are on the same page. Although this won’t stop technical problems from arising (and they will) this will stop those “so how do you see this working” questions in the middle of your time crunch.

Take the Next Day Off

Although I was fortunate to only have a light work load on the following Monday, I was dragging. My body was going through caffiene withdrawl and even after 14 hours sleep I was exhausted. Infact up until about an hour ago (over 36 hours after) I didn’t feel “right”. I don’t care what age you are, you just shouldn’t do that to your body…. that often

Get Sleep Before the Last Day

We started off fairly strong and slept a bit on Friday night/Saturday mornings… this got us going well on Saturday night, but come Sunday morning we were dragging and snappy at each other. Holding it together till Sunday night was rough and there was many points where I felt that I would rather sleep then finish. Perhaps being better prepared  would have helped,

Environment Preparation

I think we really excelled here. Dan spent times going through the plugins and gems we wanted to use and made sure that he understand how they worked and I did some trial runs in setting up the server and getting it up and running with github. These two tasks probably saved us tons of time in plugin/gem debugging and administration, neither which would have helped us achieve our goal in anyway. Dan wrote a great article outline the work he did before hand and I signed up to Linode and ran practice drills so I knew the environment inside and out. All that prep work aside, the Rumble threw up for a little curve by not allowing us to be administrators of our own github account so I had to setup the configuration different then planned. Having a grasp of how the system worked though was a great help as I easily adjusted my plans and we were completely 100% up and running within the first hour in terms of checking in, checking out and deploying.

Don’t take Yourself Seriously … You Win no Matter What

I think if we had taken ourselves seriously there would be a lot of disappoinment in the end. We didn’t win anything… infact we didn’t come close. I am not going to gripe or complain about it, I think Dan says everything I want to say here, but I honestly feel we can walk away proud as we created an app that I personally am in awe of as well as I think something that people can use. It is a great showpiece for our portfolio and best of all it accomplishes a goal.

To sum it up, will I do the rumble again? I dunno. Honestly if the judging/rating system doesn’t get worked out I probably won’t be doing this particular rumble again as we can easily do the same sort of thing for a portfolio piece on our time frame when we are ready…. but that being same the community was a lot of fun and I have heard whisperings around of a nonprofit rumble for all Ruby frameworks that may happen and I would definately be interested in that.