That described my Saturday... What am I talking about? Rails Day
Heres the idea. You give developers the use of a language, in this case, Ruby and a platform Ruby on Rails. You then give them 24 hours to develop asolution. That's it.
John, Neil, and I had decided on entering the competition a while back, decided on anapplication, and thought about some feature sets.
Interestingly enough... we all develop .Net applications (using C#) for a living... whileNeil and I have ever written a line of Ruby before DAY OF COMPETITION while Johnexsposure was limited. We came up with something kickass in 18 hours (5am till midnight).It would be kickass to actually win... we'll have to wait till Wednesday or so to hearthe results. All I have to say, is developing an application with Ruby on Rails was fast, efficient, and very veryproductive. The amount of stuff we created in those 18 hours would take over a month witha few developers in any other language, honestly. It's concepts, languages, ideas, andmotivation that change the face of software development.
Here's howthe competition went down
Total groups: 121
Total qualifying groups: 60
Total programmers: 191
Total qualifying programmers: 120
Total hits to the web server: 167,753
Total subversion checkins: 3335
Total lines of code written (including code written by non-qualifying programmers, butnot including framework code): over 18,000!!!
Given that the initial distributed ruby (drb) code base was under 100 lines of Ruby,this Rails Day has produced quite an enormous base of open-source code to pickfrom.
Here's out entry: FannyPack
Here's our readme:
Fanny Pack is an online collaboration tool for friends and family to better communicate.One big problem with the current generation of communication tools is dealing with thedifferences between people you are corresponding with. If you'd like to post a messageabout how great your bachelor party was in Las Vegas, you have to worry about the groom'sbride seeing it as well. Fanny Pack addresses this by allowing you to create your ownnetwork of aquaintences and place them in groups as they relate to you. By creatingseparate groups for family and friends you can still wish your Mom happy birthday withoutletting all your friends know that you are still a mama's boy.
Fanny Pack also helps you reach out to your friends. From your main portal page you cantell if someone has a special event coming up. From there its a simple click to theirAmazon wishlist, and in under 5 minutes you can have your gift on the way...and it won'teven be a month late this year. User profiles and events are also location aware so youcan easily calculate what your cab ride will be back from the pub crawl (while you'restill sober).
--Fanny's Features--
- Invitation system to connect with other users
- Simple display of all aquaintence messages
- Ability to share event and calendar information
- Ties into user's Amazon wishlist for easier gift giving
- Notification of online contacts
- Profile searching
- Easily post messages to different groups of people
'Cause fanny means your arse over there... not yourminge