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!

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!

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.

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!

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.

…hi.im by Koombea!

They are closely followed by How’s My Code? by CoworkingMVD, and Tablesurfing by Gorillaminds.
Taking home the category prizes are…

• Lowdown by Microbrew Certified Partners for Appearance


• hurl by 201 for Completeness


• LAZEROIDS! by 734m for Innovation


• ZenVDN by Zencoder for Usefulness.

The award for Best Solo Application goes to Jacques Crocker for his AlertMe.tv!

Congratulations to all who participated in making this year’s Rumble the strongest yet! A big hand for our expert judges for all their hard work and feedback in qualifying teams for the public voting.

We would like in particular to thank our sponsors for making this event possible, and all of the Rails Rumble teams for making it necessary! This year, an even larger number of teams plan to continue development of their applications past the Rumble, and we wish them the best—remember us when you’re famous!

Everyone, be sure to keep an eye on your email, as we’ll be sending out information regarding prizes (including random judge prizes), along with info regarding your Github repositories and Linode servers.

Congratulations once again to the Rumble winners, and our thanks to everyone who made Rails Rumble 2009 the best Rumble yet!

After much deliberation, our expert panelists have made their selections. We’ve tallied the results, sprinkled some magic dust about, and are now ready to announce the list of finalists for the 2009 Rails Rumble championship. Woo!

We were originally going to select only 15 applications to go through to the final round, but the entries this year were simply unbelievable; a real testament to what can be done in a tiny amount of time with some sick talented designers / developer pairings, ample caffeine, and a modern set of agile tools like Ruby and Rails. It took a lot of work just to narrow it down to the list of 22 that you see here (in no particular order).

• Daily Stamp by Just Ryan
• How’s My Code? by CoworkingMVD
• Minutes by Team DUMBO
• Pockets by Winners
• Twixperts by Twixperts
• hi.im by Koombea
• ZenVDN by Zencoder
• hurl by 201
• AlertMe.tv by couch potato
• Hot Spots by Heavyweight rockstars
• omnominator by omNOMinators
• Diversion by The Catacrockers
• Bartender Cocktail Recipies by acts_as_ninjas
• Last Percent by Rawnet
• Tablesurfing by Gorillaminds
• LAZEROIDS! by 734m
• Lowdown by Microbrew Certified Partners
• loanit.to by Great Lakes Geeks
• PeepNote by Agile Nomads
• Heart On by Van Damme
• Quippopotamus by Onehub
• Let’s Wadus by Monsters of Ruby

Just because an entry isn’t in this list doesn’t mean that it doesn’t deserve to be. In fact, a couple of my personal favorite applications didn’t make the final list, which is a bummer (such as How I Really Feel, Smacksale, Rakugoka and a.ppend.to whom I really hope continue to work on their apps), but so it goes! The contest experts have spoken, and our final list is, I think, more impressive than ever before. It’s going to be a real difficult task to decide which of these applications takes home all the loot this year.

And that’s exactly why we need your help! In case you haven’t already, we invite you to register for an account, visit the leaderboard at railsrumble.com/entries, and get your vote on (ballots are located on your profile page). You’ll not only be helping us decide which team gets the top spot, but you’ll also be also entering yourself to win one of a number of randomly selected judging prizes. Do it! Now! Voting closes Sunday at midnight UTC.

Finally, teams can now view their final sets of expert panel ratings by looking at their profile just above the comments section. For those of you interested in which apps will be worked on post-rumble along with those that will be migrating your data, check out Kevin Gisi’s AWESOME rumble scores page. If your team didn’t make it through to the final list, you’re now free work on deploying new versions of your apps. Rock on.

The Rails Rumble qualifying round began last night and our panel of expert judges are currently hard at work reviewing the 161 entries that made it into the qualifying round. Damn, that’s a lot of 48-hour micro-apps. They’ve got their work cut out for them, that’s for sure.

Anyway, assuming that all goes to schedule, our finalists should be announced sometime Thursday — probably in the evening — and public voting will then commence and continue throughout the end of the week and into the weekend. It’s gonna be a nail-biter!

In the meantime, check out our updated competition homepage which features rotating site snapshots and statistics from the contest.

Holy blog posts, Batman! So Rumble Build Weekend is over and everyone is talking about their experiences. Here are some of our favorite competitor post-mortems and write-ups.

• Good Idea, Bad Idea: Thingivore’s Rails Rumble Post-Mortem by Michael Bleigh
• 2009 Rails Rumble Reflections by Scott Meade
• Lowdown – our Rails Rumble ’09 Application by Sean Cribbs
• Rails Rumble 2009 – lend.to by Jeremy Stephens
• About FastFeud.com by Arthur Chang
• Tag Better by Adam Keys
• Rails Rumble: Please Tag Your Photos by Aaron Quint
• The Thoughtbot Office was a Rumblin’ by Mike Burns

If you competed last weekend and wrote something about it, please leave a link in the comments. We’d love to hear about your experiences (both good and bad).

Btw, expert judging will begin later tonight. The organizers team is just doing a little housekeeping first…

Rails Rumble 2009 Build Weekend is now officially over. Congrats to all the teams who competed and finished an application within the allotted time period. Because we’re such nice guys, contestants have a grace period of 6 hours within which you are allowed to make further profile edits. Take another look at those profiles and make sure you’ve described the purpose of your app for our judges, noted the resources that you used during development, and so on. However, and we want to be really clear about this, contestants may not make further commits to their repositories or deploy updated code to their Linodes without being disqualified.

The next phase of the competition is the qualifying round. During this phase, which starts tomorrow, our panel of expert judges will review and rate each of the verified applications and decide, collectively, which ones advance to the final round for public voting. We’ll announce their findings later this week, when public judging opens. Stay tuned, cuz it ain’t over yet.

This is just a quick note to our contestants to let them know that they should start wrapping things up. The contest will end exactly at midnight UTC, which is only about two hours from now.

Make sure that you have finished committing and pushing all of your code before this time, and have deployed the version of your code tagged with the ‘railsrumble09’ identifier. Please review the pre-competition notes and the official rules and make sure you have verified your submission using the tools on your Rails Rumble team profile. Our advice is to do this early, in order to make sure you have time to correct any last minute oversights!

After the competition closes, you will have a time window of six hours in which to finish modifying your team profile. You should make sure to fill out all the relevant fields, including the resources you’ve used in your project (this is very important, you must list any and all tools and libraries you’ve used!), uploading an appealing screenshot, and providing an optional screencast or URL for more information.

If you have any questions or problems, you can reach us via the #railsrumble channel in Freenode IRC, via our Tender support system or by email at organizers at railsrumble.com. Note that if you get in touch with us after the submission deadline, we will not be able to help you.

Thanks, and best of luck on the final stretch of your Rails Rumble build weekend!

In an effort to improve the competition this year, The RailsRumble team has made a number of changes to different aspects of the competition. Two of the most prominent changes were the introduction of our automated verification system ("Pugalier" internally) which will be discussed in later posts and our switch to using Tender, by the cool team over at entp.

In addition to the method we've used in previous years, IRC, we've modified our workflow to make it easier for us to handle and delegate support using Tender. Every page in the rumble app now features an embedded support widget and with special thanks to Brian Turnbull, (one of Rumble team members), support has been churning along a lot better.

Tender's worked well for us this year and has made it a lot easier for us to respond to and help teams. As an extra bonus, the entp guys not only sponsored our Tender install but have also provided a ton of awesome prizes which this years contestants can get a chance to win!

Rails Rumble 2009 Build Weekend is officially underway!

Contestants can now log into their accounts and begin working on their projects and configuring their webhosts. GitHub and Linode access information can be found on the profile page once you are signed in.

Remember that the contest ends at midnight UTC Sunday evening. We will not be allowing late commits. Enjoy yourselves, be good, and build some fantastic web applications! We all look forward to seeing what you come up with.

If you need support, you can visit the support link found at the bottom of the page, which will take you to our help desk system, Tender, graciously provided for us by the fine folks at ENTP. You can also find organizers in the official IRC channel, #railsrumble on the Freenode IRC network, or on Twitter at @railsrumble (please use the #railsrumble hashtag to tweet about your progress in the event!)

Have fun! We’ll see you in 48 hours or thereabouts!

With the rumble very nearly upon us, We thought we'd take the time to discuss a few key rumble points (namely, how the competition will work this year) and to point out a few cool associated projects you rumbler's might want to check out.

Getting Started / How It Will Work

At Midnight GMT (see the banner up top for a countdown), the rumble will officially open. for this year. When this happens, several things will happen:

• You will be able to boot your Linode (you can set it up now, see below)
• You will be given access to your github repository (you may be added shortly before, if you commit to the repository before Midnight GMT you will be disqualified).
• The 48 hour countdown will begin.

As mentioned above, the details for your Linode account are already visible from your teams page meaning that you should be able to log in and set it up / choose an OS. Of course, you will be unable to boot your VPS until the competition actually opens.

Your github repository details will also be listed there but you will not have permission to access the repository until the competition starts. Also please note that repository access will be updated automatically every 15-20 minutes automatically (so if you need to change your github name / haven't added it yet, it will automatically be added in due time)

Tagging / Finishing Up

For your entry to be counted as complete / entered into judging, You will need to do a couple of things before the competition close.

First, You will be required to push a git tag to Github to mark the deployed version of your application. This year the official tag is 'railsrumble09'. To push this tag, you can manually do it or you can use the rumble toolkit gem (see below). To push manually, you'll need to run the following:

git tag -a railsrumble09 -m 'Tagging final release' git push --tags

Please note that this year there will not be a final patch post-competition close as there has been in final years. If you're using Capistrano and wish to ensure it deploys your tag, add the following line to your Capfile / deploy.rb:

set :branch, "railsrumble09"

Once that is complete, you will need to edit your team profile (note that most details will remain editable until shortly after the competition) to add access details. Namely, we will need to know a username for your VPS and the path the the deployed root (e.g /var/apps/my-app/current) for your Rack / Rails application.

You will also need to add our SSH public key for the user you specify. If you're not sure how to do this, you have two options: you can view last years instructions (under 'Server SSH Keys / Access' - please note that some of the visual aspects below have changed for this year) OR you can log in as the aforementioned user on your VPS and run this:

ruby -r open-uri -e 'eval(open("http://r09.railsrumble.com/rumble-ssh-setup.txt").read)'

Once all of that is done, you should be able to log in and submit your team for verification. This will do a series of checks to ensure all the information we need to login to your vps / verify your entry is correct. On your teams page you should see roughly the following:

Simply press "request verification" and you'll be added to the verification queue. Please note that if you have the team dashboard page open, you'll be notified when verification is complete. Once verification is done, your team page should show a new result. For us to judge you, please ensure your result at the end of the competition is green and is marked as 'passed' like below:

You can request verification at any point during and after the competition.

Handy Helpers

This year, We've also put together a gem (with the help of Kevin Gisi) that makes it easy to do a lot of the most common rumble tasks. To install it, run:

sudo gem install railsrumble-rumble-tools --source http://gems.github.com

Installing this will provide a command, rumble, which has a bunch of handy tools. Running it without arguments will simply show info. The most important uses (on your local development machine) are:

• rumble identify API-KEY - Sets it up to operate as you (api key found on your user profile page when logged in)
• rumble init or rumble init path-to-local-clone - Used for other commands, tells it where you have checked out your repository.
• rumble tag - Uses the repository path initialized using init to apply and push the correct tag to github
• rumble clone or rumble clone destination - Attempts to clone and initialize your application from github automatically (equiv. to doing git clone repo-url && rumble init path-to-repo)

It also includes some Twitter and Tumblr related convenience tools.

If you're running it on your server, you also have two very handy commands:

• rumble setup-ssh-key - sets up the ssh key (see above) for the current user
• rumble notify-details or rumble notify-details path-to-app - Takes an application path (defaulting to the current dir) and updates your team profile with that information along with your deployment username (the current user)

All in all, it's a handy way to do a bunch of rumble-related tasks (instead of performing them manually as mentioned above)

Also worth checking out...

Lastly, here are a couple of noteworthy projects / links worth checking out before the competition. I also encourage you to check out IRC -- we're idling in #railsrumble on Freenode -- and visit the new team dashboard (available when the competition starts).

• rumble-helper - an open-source rumble-specific tasks application built by one of our contestants, Jeremy Stephens. Seriously handy and worth checking out
• Open ID Authentication - Because, if you use OpenID, you have a strategic advantage here; what judge is going to want to create 20+ different user accounts?
• Authtrial - An Authlogic-based sample application with built in trial user support, which is a great alternative! (built by Kevin Gisi)
• gonow's live rumble cam - Gonow, a Brazillian Company, sponsored 3 competing teams and have put up a great site including a live cam!
• And, something similar by the railslove team

To all teams, good luck and enjoy the competition!

So you like the prizes, right? Only one more day until build weekend starts (at midnight GMT). Are you ready, contestants?

If you have time during the weekend, take some photos to document the event and your progress. Then share them with the Flickr group. There are already a few championship belt teaser shots up there. Enjoy!