Well, it’s midnight (GMT). That means that the floodgates are now open as the build portion of the 2008 Rails Rumble competition has begun. We’re extremely excited to see what you’ll be building over the next 48 hours and we hope that you make the best of it!

Here are a few important notes pertaining to teams who are participating in the build portion of the event:

• If you’ve already added your GitHub (http://github.com) username you should be good to go. You’ll find the relevant account information on your team profile page. If you haven’t heeded our warnings and have not yet added your GitHub username to your personal profile, add it now! A periodic task will be running every 20 minutes to update permissions so the sooner you do it the sooner you’ll have the access you need.

• Similarly, your Linode (http://linode.com) VPS access information should be found on your team profile page. Feel free to login with it and start building your VPS. I’d suggest a distro that doesn’t need to be compiled from source ;-).

• When you’re finished on Sunday evening (or sooner), make sure to tag the version of the code that you’re going to push to your VPS as ‘railsrumble’. This is extremely important. Teams with a final deployed codebase that differs from the version bearing that tag may be disqualified.

• Also make sure to update your team profile information before wrapping things up. You’ll find new fields to list third party libraries and tools used, etc. Further editing of this information will be frozen after Sunday night (the close of the build portion of the competition) in preparation for voting.

• RunCodeRun (http://runcoderun.com) has been generous enough to offer seats for 100 projects for their hosted Continuous Integration service to Rails Rumble users. See the email that was sent to participating team members and alerts list participants for more information and the invitation code. Or ask in IRC.

As always, if you have any questions feel free to email organizers at railsrumble.com. We’ll be monitoring this box and will respond as we can. Better yet, visit us in #railsrumble on the Freenode IRC network. That’s the best way to get immediate help and also to connect with other Rumblers.

Take care, best of luck, and make sure to get plenty of sleep. Seriously!