Registration Coming Soon!

So, one of our Rumble superheroes unfortunately got bitten by a radioactive spider, and he’s been really tied up since. *cue snare*

Unfortunately, this means we’re going to have to delay registration by a little bit - we’re really excited to get underway, but we need a little more time to follow up with sponsors, brush up on our legalese, and get everything completely settled. But keep an eye out, because registration won’t be far off!

In the meantime:

Rules for Remote Teams

We’ve had a few questions regarding digital assets before the competition. Obviously, we want to be fair to everyone, and teams that can meet up and do some planning on paper certainly have a leg up on the planning process. We want to make sure that teams that work remotely can still enjoy the planning process, so here’s what we’ve come up with:

IF you want to some remote planning (say, a todo list, or some sketches of the site), that’s fine. Writing some Rake tasks, or creating a ready-to-slice Photoshop file…these would be examples of stepping over the line. We don’t want people creating digital assets that they will use in their production applications. So, be grown-ups, be responsible, and use things for planning, and not for production.

One caveat, if you do decide to do some remote planning, your work must be publicly available, and you must list it on your team’s page (just like our policy with third-party libraries). If in doubt about what’s fair, feel free to drop us a line, and we’ll weigh in.

Get Psyched!

We’re so excited for this competition, and we hope you are too! We’ve been juggling stickers, logos, experts, prizes, sponsors, and exhibition categories, and they’re all going to blow you away. So make sure to get thinking about your team, and stay tuned, because registration is right around the corner!!

2010 Contest Sponsors v1.0

Ask and ye shall receive. In case you didn’t see the tweets, I wanted to call a little attention to our first batch of 2010 contest sponsors. A big thanks to our old friends at Thoughtbot, Intridea, and BDDCasts for supporting us again this year, and to our new friends at Tropo, Koombea, The Frontier Group, Juicer, Mogotest, Screencasts.org, and StickerMule. Please take a few minutes and check out our sponsors page to read about the great products and services offered by these folks, many of which will be available as contest prizes or special promotions to all entrants.

Of course, extra not-so-sekrit special thanks goes to Linode and GitHub who are supporting the Rumble yet again as infrastructure partners. We really (seriously! no kidding!) couldn’t do it without these guys. Did I mention that they’ve allowing us to expand to offer 300 team spots this year? Yessir.

Finally, I’d also like to thank Rob Dempsey over at ActsAsConference, who is offering a special promotion rate for RailsRumble enthusiasts; you can register using the code “railsrumble” and receive $75 off. Is very good deal.

We’ve got a few more sponsor deals in the works, and some really exciting exhibition matches that we’ll be announcing soon. As of right now, all the heavyweight spots are officially spoken for. However, we still have sponsorship opportunities avaialble at the middleweight and lightweight levels, and we’d love to have you on board for the ride. So if you’re interested in sponsorship, or have an exhibition match to propose, make sure to reach out to us.

Calling All Sponsors

The Rails Rumble simply wouldn’t be possible without some sweet sponsorship lovin. Sponsors take care of our infrastructure and related costs, sponsors help us shape the way the contest is run, and, of course, sponsors make swanky prizes possible for winners. What would a contest be without prizes, right?

Although the 2010 Rumble is happening in mid-October, we’re starting the search for sponsors now. By getting in early, sponsors help us build momentum and connect with contestants. And they, in turn, get more airtime and opportunities to show their support.

There are sponsorship opportunities available at a couple different commitment levels, and, although sponsors offering good old-fashioned cash is awesome, we also allow certain sponsorship levels to provide support through donation of product / services. So if you’re interested in getting your brand or product in front of a bunch of talented, passionate (some might say “crazy”) web developers, please get in touch with us to find out more about packages and opportunities.

We’re also introducing a new concept this year, called the Exhibition Match. Exhibition Match sponsors will be able to set their own independent judging criteria and award a special category award to the contestant who impresses them the most. For example, a company that wishes to promote use of their API might want to create an Exhibition Match for “Most Innovative Use of ____ API”. Insert your company name in the blank. And then imagine what kind of crazy stuff our intrepid contestants might do with it.

These Exhibition Matches will only be offered to higher-level and “heavyweight” sponsorships, of which there are a limited number, so let us know if you’re interested, why it’s cool, and we’ll work something out!

2010: The Year We Made Rumble History!

Add this date to your calendars: October 15-17, 2010

That’s right, we’re back again! It’s time to start revving your engines for the next Rails Rumble - the 48-hour challenge that gives developers a chance to show off just how powerful Ruby and Rails can be!

For those new to the Rumble, imagine this:

On a Friday evening (for most of us), you sit at your computer, with up to three of your closest friends nearby, when suddenly your Twitter stream starts flooding! Your IRC windows start flashing by! Your friends start clicking rapidly on their own machines! “It’s up!” one of them yells.

You have forty-eight hours, up to three friends, a shared Git repository, a remote server, and Rails (or your favorite Rack-based framework). From that point on, it’s up to you - to design, develop, and deploy the greatest web application the world has ever seen!

Sound awesome? Add ninjas, rewards, a championship belt, for goodness sake! And to top it off, you’ll be competing against some of the coolest people in the Rails industry. But don’t just take our word for it…

You can code on a boat, like the Great Lakes Geeks did last year! In 2008, they took the grand prize for the MeetInBetween.us application

Last year, their submission didn’t place, but it came really close, and they got to code on a boat! Certainly sounds like a win to us!

Or take a look at the folks at Zencoder, whose submission last year, ZenVDN, took the prize for Most Useful. They got accepted by YCombinator, and have launched a successful business!!

Perhaps even more fun, the team that developed the Innovation-award-winning Lazeroids, had so much fun with their application, they decided to write it again, using Node.js!

So start thinking about what you might want to build, and who you might want to work with. Your Rumble admins are working hard to make sure this is going to be the best Rumble yet! We’ll be posting more information as the date gets closer, but make sure to mark it off on your calendar - the 4th Rails Rumble event is going to rock your world like it’s never been rocked before!

Zencoder Rocks Y-Combinator

Good news, everyone! Our friends at Zencoder, who took home the ‘Most Useful’ category prize in 2009 RailsRumble for ZenVDN, just found out that they’ve been accepted to Y-Combinator, the influential seed funding program run by Paul Graham and co.

Over the last few years, Y-Combinator has spawned success stories such as Reddit, Loopt, Xobni, Dropbox, Heroku, and Disqus to name but a few. Keep an eye on these guys, they’re going to do great things. We wish them the best of luck!

Edit: At this point, they’ve now launched.

MVC Melee is Rails Rumble for ASP.NET

Our friends JP Toto and Sara Chipps have put together a 48-hour innovation competition called MVC Melee that brings the spirit of the Rails Rumble to Microsoft web app developers. If you’re a .NET nerd, you should definitely check this out. Looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun!

Rumble Panel at CodeMash

Back in May, I moderated a panel at Railsconf 2009 to answer questions about developing web applications in 48 hours for the Rails Rumble competition. We’re excited to announce that this panel will be revisited at CodeMash 2010.

This time the panel will be moderated by former panelist Joe Fiorini and 2008 grand prize winner Josh Walsh. Panelists include Josh Owens (grand prize winner 2007, finalist 2009), Jonathan Penn (grand prize winner 2008, finalist 2009), Jim Weirich (participant 2008), Josh Schramm (participant 2009), and Matt Yoho (participant 2009). As with the Railsconf panel, questions will be released on Google moderator before the start of the conference (stay tuned for that announcement). At that time we’ll need your help to provide questions for the panelists to answer.

About CodeMash

CodeMash is an annual conference held in Sandusky, Ohio at the Kalahari indoor waterpark and resort. It is a unique event that educates developers on current practices, methodologies, and technology trends in a variety of platforms and development languages such as Java, .Net, Ruby, Python and PHP. Check out this year’s list of sessions and register to attend!

Judging Prize Winners

This year we randomly selected five people who participated as judges to receive prizes, including Amazon Gift Cards and O’Reilly E-Books. We’re happy to announce our lucky winners:

• Chris Kite
• Roberto Soares
• Seckin Anil Unlu
• Chris Spada
• Amr Numan Tamimi

Thanks guys, for participating in the contest! And thank-you to all the other judges who helped out, too. I wish we could reward all of you, srsly. We simply wouldn’t be able to do this sort of thing without your support.

Affiliapp wins Ready To Earn

This year we tried to make the competition better than ever, and part of that was adding an exhibition category “Ready to Earn” sponsored by Spreedly. Today the winner was announced and Affiliapp is taking home a brand new Spreedly Kickstart so that they can make even more money! The overall winning team, ‘Hi,I’m’ also won a Spreedly Kickstart.

Affiliapp was determined to best meet the three criteria for winning the Ready to Earn prize:

• a clear business model,
• an application that offers real value, and
• a working Spreedly integration

Read the full rundown on Spreedly’s blog. Thanks again to our great sponsors!

Special Launchly Promotion for Participants

Congrats again to the Rumble class of ’09! Some truly amazing apps were created during this years event and it really goes to show how powerful Ruby and Rails. And of course how good you all are at leveraging them.

Contestants, if you plan to continue improving your apps — and we hope you do — our friends at Launchly are offering a promo code for a free service package that you might want to check out. Launchly is a service devoted to helping new web apps get the information and early exposure they need to succeed by providing iterative feedback and analytics services (launch, get feedback, tweak, launch again) that can help you gauge how your launch is performing. And of course it’s written in Rails ;-).

To get started, simply visit Launchly and sign in using OpenID (no new account is necessary, and no billing information is needed). The promo code to use is: RAILSRUMBLE09. Just choose the Plus tier, enter the promo code in the appropriate field, and your launch will be up and running in no time. Woot.