Rails Rumble

Rails Rumble: Delayed but not Forgotten

2012-04-23T00:00:00-04:00

Hello fellow Rumblers!

First off, apologies for the radio silence — 2012 has been a bit of a hectic year. What with this looming apocalypse, we’re racing to get a ton of things done!

In an earlier post, we were hinting at an early 2012 event, but now we’re shooting for a late summer one, trying to land just before the slew of fall conferences, so keep an eye out for more on that!

We’ve had some discussions on how we can revamp the competition to make it an even better experience this year, and we’re very excited about some of the ideas we’re tossing around. Really, we want to strive to increase the visibility for as many submissions as we can, and help everyone get great feedback. Of course, we’re still very committed to getting great prizes to our winning contestants as well!

Right now, we’re looking at changing the way we handle public voting, tossing around some ideas that give our expert panel more time to provide you with great feedback, and even considering tweaking the voting categories to offer a more holistic view of the apps. We’d love to hear your suggestions, so drop us some notes in the comments!

Looking forward to Rumble 2012!

Rails Rumble — Springtime Edition

2011-09-12T00:00:00-04:00

Howdy everybody, from organizers around the globe! No, literally, we span three continents now.

Alright, so we’re going to need you to have a seat, take a deep breath. Would you like a beer? No, you sure? Okay then. Well, we have some unfortunate news.

This year’s Rumble is going to be briefly delayed. Unfortunately, the organizers got a bit over-committed this year. We got together and decided that if we were going to do this again, we were going to do it right!

So, in order to make sure the next Rumble truly kicks ass, we’re bringing on a few new folks, and working to decide a date in early 2012. Stay tuned to this blog for more information about sponsor packages, registration, and more, but out of respect for turkeys and religions, we feel it’s best to hold off on the event until after Thanksgiving and the winter holidays.

We’re getting new organizers up to speed and revving up this event as we speak, so be patient, ye shall Rumble once again! Keep an eye on our blog for more news, and keep planning your ideas; we can’t wait to see what you all come up with this year!

Introducing the Rumble Alumni Archive

2011-07-01T00:00:00-04:00

Hello everyone! Long-time, no-speak. We hope you’ve been well.

2011 has been a busy year for all of the Rumble organizers so far, and as such there’s currently no date set for Rails Rumble 2011. However, (OMFG!) we’re making more concrete plans very soon. So stay tuned!

In the meantime, check out the new RR Alumni Archive mini site! Designed to be a showcase for websites and applications that were developed during the Rumble, you can browse the archive to view entries by year, by country of origin, and by award.

Did you know that there are over 80 applications developed during Rails Rumble events that are still online and kicking ass? Of course you did. But did you also know that many of them have evolved significantly and are still being actively developed, such as Commendable Kids (2010), Mocksup (2009), Rails Wizard, and IOU Mate (2008, formerly “nDebted”)? What you start in a weekend can really have a lasting impact!

So check it out, see how your favorite entry is doing today, and of course, let us know if we’ve missed anybody in our listing. We tried to be as thorough as possible but I’ve no doubt there are others out there (especially entries from 2007).

Stay in touch Rumblers! And we’ll have more info about future events soon.

Twitter Challenge Winner

2010-11-05T00:00:00-04:00

A large number of teams this year chose to compete in the special Twitter challenge sponsored by our friends at Oneforty and Compass Labs. Well, we’re happy to announce that they’ve made their selections!

Congratulations to both Natter and Linkodrama who were chosen as the category winner and first runner up, respectively.

For more information, check out the announcement on the Oneforty developer blog. Oneforty also recently highlighted some of the other Twitter-based apps that were built during the competition.

Zencoder Challenge Winner

2010-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

NOTE: This is a guest post by one of our challenge match sponsors, Zencoder.

The Rails Rumble programming competition introduced Exhibition Matches this year – specific challenges for Rumble teams. Zencoder sponsored one, titled Best Use of Video/Audio. After weeding through some excellent entries, we’ve decided to award the prize to MovieNight.

The Challenge

Our challenge was simple:

Do something awesome with video or audio! Build a social app, a mashup, a business tool, a game, or something else. Check out Zencoder for backend video processing, or VideoJS to embed video using HTML5 or Flash, or another tool. You don’t have to use Zencoder, but we’ll offer you free encoding during the Rumble. Just do something cool that involves video or audio.

48 hours isn’t a lot of time, but it’s impressive how a good team will step up to this sort of pressure. 180 teams finished an app during this time, and the best were extremely impressive.

Several entries used video and audio, and we had a reasonably strong pool of apps to pick from.

The Winner

We chose MovieNight as our winner. Movienight is a simple web app where users can watch movies socially. You create a “showing”, which says “We’re going to watch Movie X in three hours.” You can invite friends to watch with you. You can comment on movies as they go, along with friends. And, of course, you can actually watch movies.

There are several cool things about MovieNight.

It works. This is important; it’s hard to judge an app’s functionality when you can’t log in, or the core doesn’t work.
They have actual movies. You can actually watch Night of the Living Dead, Nosferatu, and Charlie Chaplin’s classic The Gold Rush. The movies are old, of course – public domain? – but there are dozens or hundreds of them.
It’s a cool idea. I can actually imagine using something like this. Not all the time, of course. But the idea is interesting: remote watching can still be social watching.

MovieNight isn’t perfect, of course. To really work, playback should be synchronized across every viewer, so if someone pauses the movie in one browser, it should pause in others. While some of the content is classic, most of it is crap. And the design is pretty rudimentary. But the team went from Zero to Watch A Real Movie Socially in 48 hours, and that’s pretty cool.

Other Entries

While there were several good entrants, two others stood out. Consider these “runners-up.”

AgileMeeting was the most ambitious of the batch. The site lets you schedule a meeting, invite participants, and hold a video conference right in the browser. Or at least, they do most of that – we weren’t actually able to get the video conferencing to work. Maybe we missed something, or maybe we used the wrong browser. But it looks like they got much of the way there, which is impressive.

Vidja is a really, really simple video sharing site. Upload a video and watch it in a HTML5 video player. No settings to mess with, no other features. We love the simplicity, but would have liked to see either a bit more design polish (simple and elegant) or a bit more functionality (simple and powerful). Sadly, the Vidja website isn’t up today. Hopefully it’s just a temporary blip.

Full Disclosure

Using Zencoder wasn’t a requirement of winning this Exhibition Match, but several of the entrants did. For example, MovieNight used VideoJS, the free, open-source HTML5 video player created by Zencoder.

Zencoder competed in the Rails Rumble in 2009, and built ZenVDN, which won the “Most Useful” prize. We didn’t compete this year.

Chargify Challenge Winner

2010-10-28T00:00:00-04:00

Note: This is a guest post by one of our challenge match sponsors, Chargify.

After looking over the 36 entries for our “Most Potential to Monetize” challenge at the Rails Rumble event, we have finally come to a decision. It was a team effort to decide on the winner for our challenge. After going through all of the entries, we had each member of the Chargify team share their top pick on which entry they thought was most likely to monetize with billing.
It came down to two entries and WORKRZ came out on top as the winner.

WORKRZ is a casual shift management application that lets you manage and connect your casual employees online and gives you the ability to instantly see which employees are available to work. The WORKRZ application really stood out to us as it had a clear potential to monetize beyond advertising, and well, it was pretty cool too!

As the winner of the “Chargify: Most Potential to Monetize” challenge, WORKRZ will receive one year free of Chargify services along with a brand new iPod touch!

We would also like to recognize Commendable Kids as our runner up. Commendable Kids enables you to award children badges for their accomplishments and hard work, as well as allow others, such as family and friends, to become fans of the child and give them high fives and encouragement. They were a very close second to WORKRZ and will also receive a year free of Chargify services.

Thanks everyone who participated in our challenge. We were very impressed with what you all were able to come up with in just 48 hours!

Tropo Challenge Winner

2010-10-28T00:00:00-04:00

This year in addition to the main competition, we had four special sponsor challenges that teams could opt-in for. Over the next week or so, we’ll be announcing the winners of those challenges, hand selected by the sponsors.

We’re happy to report that the first of these special awards goes to our friends at Instalover for their SMS-based instant blind dating app. Instalover was chosen by Tropo for the “Best Use of Real-Time Communications” category and the team members are getting some sweet Sonos S5 Music systems for their efforts.

If you haven’t already, check out Instalover. And then surf over to the Tropo Blog, where they have a brief interview with the winning team.

Competition Linodes Expire November 12th

2010-10-26T00:00:00-04:00

The Linode VPS provided to each Rumble team is going end-of-life on November 12th, 2010. Details on how to convert a competition VPS to a paid plan (with 2 months free after the first paid month!) will be emailed to all Rumble participants by Thursday, October 28th. If you don’t receive yours by Friday, please log in to your competition VPS with your Rumble credentials and open a Linode support ticket.

It’s Over

2010-10-23T00:00:00-04:00

Public voting wrapped up a few minutes ago and we’ve got our winners:

Indiana Coders for Beer Checkin
Platform45 for Owe Me Cash
Nuby on Rails for Choons.fm

Solo Division Winner:

My Other Car Is Your Face for tldr.it

Category Winners:

For Appearance: Agile Nomads for Commendable Kids
For Completeness: Black and White for Go vs Go
For Innovation: acts_as_ninjas for Warsquare
For Usefulness: The Dudes for Awesome Fontstacks

Congratulations to the teams who placed this year, and to everyone who participated. Ultimately the real winners are those that take advantage of the Rumble launch boost and continue to enhance their applications over the coming weeks and months. Please drop us a line if you’ve got interesting news, we’re looking forward to seeing what happens now that the contest is over and the codefreeze is lifted.

Over the next couple days we’ll also be announcing the results of the sponsor challenges, so stay tuned to the blog for more details.

Before we go we’d like to thank all our awesome event sponsors, infrastructure partners Linode and GitHub, and our expert panelists. We couldn’t have done this without you!

24 Hours To Go

2010-10-22T00:00:00-04:00

Just a quick reminder: voting ends tomorrow night at midnight GMT (8:00PM EST). That’s just a little more than 24 hours from now! Thanks to everyone who’s shown up to vote and helped us spread the word. The top scoring apps are all pretty close together at the moment, and there’s still plenty of time for shakeups to happen.

So if you haven’t already, check out the current leaderboard and sign up for an account so you can judge some entries. We’re really looking forward to seeing who your favorites are.

PS we just got a real nice article over at TechCrunch highlighting some of their favorite apps. Sweet.

Finalists and Public Voting

2010-10-21T00:00:00-04:00

Our spectacular panel of experts are finished with their duties (thanks for all the hard work, guys and gals!), and the 2010 Rails Rumble finalists have been announced. Go take a look, and if you haven’t already, sign up for an account and help us decide which of these entries will be our winner this year.

Now that public voting has officially begun, teams that didn’t make the final round and who aren’t participating in a sponsor challenge can once again start pushing updates to their live sites. We know that many of you have been waiting for that opportunity, and we can’t wait to see where you take your project from here. Remember: building a successful web property isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon.

Just to be double super extra clear, please note that if you opted in to a special sponsor challenge, we ask that you hold off on further updates even if you didn’t make the top tier. Sponsors will be making their decisions after public voting closes and the main competition winners are announced, and it’d be unfair for some applications to be able to update while others (that did make it into the top tier) are forbidden from doing that. Don’t worry, it’s just a couple more days!

That’s it for now. Go get your vote on and be merry. Thanks again to our experts, event sponsors, and most of all to everyone who spent last weekend hacking with us. You all rock.

Introducing the Geniuses!

2010-10-17T00:00:00-04:00

What do user experience guru Dan Brown, lead TechCrunch developer Andy Brett, fantastic comic book writer and filmmaker Jim Krueger, startup advocate and investor David Cohen, co-founder of Wired magazine and author Kevin Kelly, and that-guy-from-that-blog-post Zed Shaw have in common?

They’re all experts who are here to help evaluate your application. You’ve all worked incredibly hard for the past 48 hours — now it’s their turn. These individuals will turn your applications upside down, looking at the appearance, the utility, the user flow, and providing you with helpful feedback.

One of the great things we’ve seen over the years is that even the teams that don’t make it past the preliminary round often continue developing their app. We’ve even had a few teams launch successful products from their 48-hour sprints! So take advantage of the feedback you get, and we’d love to hear your success stories.

The organizers are truly humbled to be working with a panel of such esteemed professionals — but don’t take our word for it!

Check them out for yourself!

Pencils Down!

2010-10-17T00:00:00-04:00

It’s been a crazy 48 hours. And from what we’ve seen so far, a very productive 48 hours. We’ve been blown away by some of the entries we’ve seen so far, and we think that our judges will be too. In fact, we can’t wait to review them all.

Wrapping Up

Please make sure to completely fill out your team / entry profiles. If you haven’t already, include a short, concise description of your application and the resources you used when creating it. You have the next 24 hours to wrap this up (but the sooner you do it, the better). Don’t make any code changes from this point forward. If you do, you will be disqualified. You may log into your Linode to restart a stuck process or access your Rails console of course, but the code deployed on your box must match the final tag you deployed.

As one final reminder, you need to tag the final version of your code with the word ’rumble10’ and push those tags up to GitHub. If you need help with this, check this blog post. The version of your app deployed to production must match the tagged code. Git tags are locked down for reals at 10 past, and then that’s that. Verification will be finalized one hour from now and at that point, teams that don’t pass verification will be disqualified.

Judging Starts… Soon

Over the next few hours we’ll be verifying entries and getting things prepared for our expert panel judging round. We may get in touch with you if we have questions. Once expert judging begins, our experts will be rating your applications on a scale of 1-5 in four different categories and leaving you constructive feedback. Feel free to engage them in conversation. They love that sort of thing.

After they finish, the highest rated entries will go on to the public judging round. Regardless of whether or not your entry is selected for that, we hope you’ll continue to stay involved Wednesday through Friday by voting on the top tier applications and helping us decide the winner of Rails Rumble 2010.

Thanks again for your dedication and hard work, and good luck during judging!

60 Minute Warning

2010-10-17T00:00:00-04:00

This is just a friendly reminder… Rails Rumble 2010 build weekend wraps up in less than 60 minutes. If you’re competing, you should be pretty much done at this point. Please take the last hour to make sure that you’ve tagged and deployed the final version of your code and that you’ve successfully run the verification process as described here.

(If you tagged too early, here’s a quick fix)

This is very important. We will not be allowing any code changes after the bell rings this year. I repeat, we will not be allowing any code changes after the bell rings this year. No excuses. :) If you are not verified you will not be able to enter the judging round.

Also make sure to list any resources you used during the competition on your team profile. And if you’re competing in a sponsor challenge ensure that you’ve selected to opt-in to that challenge from your team profile.

Thanks and good luck wrapping things up!

Ohhhhhhh, we’re halfway there…!

2010-10-16T00:00:00-04:00

Esteemed Rumblers, we’re coming up on the half-way mark. We’re really excited to see all the cool projects you guys have been working on. We’ve been keeping busy ourselves, getting ready for some really awesome expert judging - set to take place immediately after you all put your pencils down!

Also, thanks to the wonderful folks at Pusher, we’ve got a shiny new Rumble Dashboard that shows off all the crazy commits, tweets, and messages you guys have been sending out as you’ve been working. A huge thanks to our friends at Pusher for their hard work!

Why not deploy now?

Remember, early feedback is good feedback. That’s why we’re encouraging everyone to take a few minutes to test out their deployment. Tweet up your successes, shout out to the IRC chat and show us how cool your projects already are - but most importantly, continue developing with the confidence that you won’t end up in a time-crunch trying to deploy those last-minute changes when we get down to the wire.

So give it a shot, deploy now. Let’s see those placeholder pages, and be proud!

When You’re Done

We need you to do a few things before the competition ends to be considered for judging.

First, we need you to push a git tag to GitHub to mark the deployed version of your app. To push the tag, go ahead and run:

git tag -a rumble10 -m 'Tagging final release'
      git push --tags

Secondly, make sure you add all the information for your VPS and your application into your team’s profile page. Specifically, we need to know the username for your VPS, and the path to the root of your application.

Thirdly, you need to add our SSH public key for the user you have specified. You can run this on your server under that user:

ruby -r open-uri -e 
        'eval(open("http://r10.railsrumble.com/rumble-ssh-setup.txt").read)'

Once you have done all of this, you can 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.

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

Best of luck for the remaining hours!

— The Organizers