The Rails Rumble is a distributed programming competition where teams of one to four people, from all over the world, have 48 hours to build an innovative web application, with Ruby on Rails or another Rack-based Ruby web framework. After the 48 hours are up, a panel of expert judges will pick the top ten winners.

As many of you have already noticed, registration for the 2013 Rails Rumble is now open! To reserve a spot for your team, simply head over to railsrumble.com and sign in with GitHub. After signing in, you’ll be able to register a team, thus reserving a spot in the most action packed weekend of programming since the last Rails Rumble! After reserving a spot, you’ll be able to invite up to three others to join you on your team.

If you’re in search for others to join your team, or a team to join yourself, use the hashtag #rumbleteamvacancy on Twitter. (Note: I apologize for advocating the use of a hashtag, but it seemed to work well last year.)

There are a few things you should keep in mind:

• Spots are limited. Although registration is technically open until the 13th, you should reserve a spot for your team early so that you don’t miss out. However, even after registration is over, you’ll be able to add and remove people from your team all the way up until when the competition starts on the 19th.

• Expert judges can’t sign up for hundreds of Rails Rumble entries, whether it’s by email or via Twitter. It’s important to remember this when designing your entry. The easier it is to try, the happier the judges will be. If your application needs user accounts, we strongly encourage you to employ a Guest User Record style system to let visitors easily give your app a try.

• If you reserve a spot for a team and later want to join a different team, realize you’re unable to compete, or just want to change teams, go to railsrumble.com, sign in with GitHub, click the account button on the top left, click Team Dashboard, then click the Leave link next to your name under the Team Members section. If you’re the last member of the team, your team will be deleted and your spot will become available for another team that will no doubt be eternally grateful to their anonymous patron.

• To keep up to date with everything Rails Rumble leading up to the competition and during the competition, you should follow @railsrumble on Twitter.

• Have you followed @railsrumble on Twitter yet?

• To hang out with other rumblers before, during, and after the competition, fire up your favorite IRC client and go to #railsrumble on Freenode.

• Help spread the word about this year’s Rails Rumble! Take to Twitter and let your followers know that you’ve registered and are ready to knock their socks off.

• We’re extremely happy to welcome a number of new sponsors that are helping to make the 2013 Rails Rumble happen. Please take some time to check them out!

Okay, I think that’s enough things to keep in your mind for now. Watch for a few posts leading up to the competition about various Important and Interesting Things^tm, though.

If you need help with anything or have any questions at all, please feel free to contact the organizers. Otherwise, the competition starts on October 19th at 00:00:00 UTC, so don’t be late! We’ll be emailing you about 6 to 12 hours before the competition with more details about your Linode account and GitHub repository.

And finally, while the Rails Rumble is a competition, it’s also about the Ruby community. Be nice. Make friends. Build something you’re proud of. Have fun.

- @tsmango