About

To read more about the Rails Rumble and see a number of frequent questions, check here.

Code of Conduct

To read our official Code of Conduct, check here

Contest Rules

What follows is a quick summary of the rules. Before entering, you’ll be asked to accept the full, official rules, which you can read below. If you have any questions, please feel free to email the organizers.

0. Ruby-Based Rack Framework Required - Ruby on Rails / Sinatra / Etc

All applications must be built using Ruby on Rails or another Rack-based Ruby web framework. No substitutes!

1. 48 Hours

As a contestant, your team has exactly 48 hours to develop your web based application during the Rumble. The competition kicks off at 12:00AM UTC / 00:00 UTC on November 7th, 2015 and will end at 11:59PM / 23:59 UTC on November 8th, 2015.

You can, of course, work on the concept for your application before the competition starts, including paper and / or digital mockups of the user interface and database entity diagrams. However, no production assets of any kind can be created until the start of the official competition period illustrated above. This includes “ready to slice” graphic design assets, application code, and code based user stores / test cases (on the other hand, Sprint.ly & Pivotal Tracker type stories are fine). Please post any information of this sort publicly, and make sure to list these items on your team profile page in order to prevent any questioning. Plan, don’t create. And if you’re in doubt, send us an email to verify.

After the initial 48 hours are up, you’ll be judged on what you’ve completed. No additional features or bugfixes are allowed after the 48 hours are up, or you’ll be disqualified.

2. Teams of One to Four Humans

Teams must be comprised of between one and four individuals. No more than four people are allowed on a team. To be eligible, teams must register during the defined registration period (space subject to availability). Additionally, every team member must have a Heroku account to register. No robots, aliens, or superheroes allowed. However, team members should feel free to dress as robots, aliens, and superheroes.

3. Source Control & Deployment at Heroku

Your team will be provided with a free app and Git repository, courtesy of Heroku that you must use. As you develop your application, you should push your progress to the repository regularly (“commit early, commit often”) in order to demonstrate progress.

Optionally, you will have access to a Git repository courtesy of GitHub that will be linked to your Heroku app where you may also push progress to.

However, at the end of the competition, your application must be deployed to Heroku at the given app. This is what will be judged.

Related to deploying at Heroku, the *.r15.railsrumble.com subdomained URLs we provide are the official URLs judges will be sent to. If you have a custom domain, you must still support requests coming into the subdomain URL we provide.

4. Building Native Apps

We ask that judges mostly consider the Ruby part of each entry and we ask that you write the most important parts of your entry in Ruby. It doesn’t have to be all Ruby, but this is a Ruby competition, so please use your best judgement.

We have also found that people are generally reluctant to download and install native apps during the judging period of the rumble, so take that into consideration. Additionally, not everyone uses iOS or Android or OS X. If you build a native app on a single platform, there will almost certainly be a percentage of people that are unable to try it, even if they wanted.

If you do build a native app, you may be asked to provide proof of commit history and access to source code to the organizers, as your native app’s code won’t be deployed to Heroku.

If you’d still like to build a native app, please take these details into consideration and disclose what was used to build each part of your entry in your team’s entry’s description, prior to the end of the competition.

5. Leverage Others

Third party software, in the form of RubyGems are allowed, even encouraged (if publicly available and allowed for the use intended by this contest). Please make sure to update your team profile once the competition has started, and list any third party libraries, plugins, or other applications make use of. Third party JavaScript libraries, Flash widgets, and other component libraries, are allowed. You must update your profile to list any external libraries that are in use and give appropriate credit and citations.

Stock photography, icon sets, and publicly available templates are allowed. Teams are prohibited from commissioning or otherwise paying for any content that is created specifically for the application as opposed to being publicly available for everyone’s use. Developing a plugin or library before the competition that provides your application’s general functionality is considered cheating. Developing a plugin or library that is publicly available and provides a general purpose publicly usable function (such as accessing an API) can be done before the competition begins. Purchases will not improve your chances of winning. This is a skill-based contest.

Your application can make use of any non-paid and publicly available third party web services. This means that services provided by established services such as Google, Yahoo, Flickr, Twitter, etc are all possible and allowable. If you’d like to use some other third party service, that service must provide a a free tier or free trial that anyone can use. For example, Pusher has a free tier. For transactional email, try Mandrill by MailChimp. As before, make sure to update your profile to list dependencies on third party services and give credit to those services accordingly.

If you have a question about a particular piece of third party software, please contact competition organizers for clarification.

6. Ownership & Open Source

Hey, we’re just running a competition here. What you do with your source once the competition is over is up to you. Open sourcing your code will neither hurt nor improve your chances. It’s up to you. Please note that competition organizers will have access to your codebase throughout the competition, in order to make sure that no cheating occurs, but we won’t steal anything, we promise! We do reserve the right to use your application’s likeness as a promotion for this or future contests, though.

7. User Privacy

Because your application will be awesome, lots of people will be reviewing it and playing around with it during the competition and review period. In the interest of protecting their information, we’re imposing a non-optional privacy policy for the duration of the event. You are not to reveal any user information to any third party, except when required by law. You are not to use account emails for any purpose other than the standard operation of your application. If you choose to continue developing your application after the Rumble has ended, you are required to notify users of any changes in your privacy policy, so they can remove the information if they so choose. For the duration of this competition you hereby agree to abide by the Privacy Policy of the Rails Rumble competition.

8. You Will Be Judged

A set of competitor judges (to qualify as a competitor judge, you must ship an application by the end of the competition) will pick their favorite applications and rank them. At the end of the competition, these rankings will be combined to find the top 10 overall winners, ranked 1 through 10. Additionally, a special “Best Solo” award will be given based on rankings. Judges may pick from all, non-disqualified entries.

Separate from judges, any member of the public may also pick their favorite application. At the end of the competition, the application that receives the most favorites from the public will receive a special “Public Favorite” award. Public judges may pick from all, non-disqualified entries.

9. You Don’t Need To Sling Code To Get Involved

You don’t need to hack Ruby or Rails to participate. We encourage front end designers to get involved too! Find a team and help out with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and graphics work. Additionally, we anticipate that only a small fraction of the people involved in this event will be on teams contributing applications. You can be a huge part of the process just by signing up for an account, and participating in the public judging once the build portion of the competition is complete.

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Rumble Technologies, LLC

Official Contest Rules - 2015 Rails Rumble

The Rails Rumble is a Skill-based contest where developers can show off their Ruby on Rails development skills in accordance with the guidelines below. Winners are chosen based on merit.

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY

A purchase will NOT increase your chance of winning.

ELIGIBILITY

Open to all participants, age thirteen (13) or above, no matter where located, except those jurisdictions in which such skill-based contest is prohibited. Void where prohibited by law. Employees of Rumble Technologies, LLC or any contest organizer, their affiliates, subsidiaries, advertising and promotion agencies, or any other suppliers to Rumble Technologies, LLC are not eligible to participate. All federal, state and local laws and regulations apply. A purchase will NOT increase your chance of winning.

HOW TO ENTER

To be a Contestant: There is one way to enter. Go to railsrumble.com, follow the links to contest sign up and complete the online entry form as prompted to register for the contest as an entrant and to create a team profile. Complete the entry form as requested.

To be a Peer Judge: Go to railsrumble.com, follow the links to contest signup and complete the online entry form as prompted to register for the contest as a peer judge. Complete the entry form as requested.

No photo copies, facsimiles or mail-in entry requests will be accepted.

All information must be complete and accurate to be eligible. Personal information collected from entrant is subject to the Privacy Policy and will not be re-used, sold or shared in any manner, unless entrant expressly agrees to receive further information on sponsor products and promotions.

COMPETITION PROCEDURES AND REQUIREMENTS

Ruby-Based Rack Framework Required - Ruby on Rails / Sinatra / Etc

All applications must be built using Ruby on Rails or other Rack-based Ruby web frameworks. No substitutes! If in doubt about whether your chosen framework qualifies, feel free to contact us.

48 Hours

As a contestant, your team has exactly 48 hours to develop your web based application during the event. The competition kicks off at 12:00am / 00:00 UTC on November 7th, 2015 and will end at 11:59PM / 23:59 UTC on November 8th, 2015 (“Contest timeframe”). You can, of course, work on the concept for your application before the competition starts, including paper and / or digital mockups of the user interface and database entity diagrams. However, no production assets of any kind can be created until the start of the official competition period illustrated above. This includes “ready to slice” graphic design assets, application code, and executable user stories / test cases (on the other hand, Sprint.ly & Pivotal Tracker type stories are fine).

After those 48 hours are completed at 11:59PM / 23:59 UTC on November 8th, 2015, an set of qualifying competitor judges (to qualify, you must be a competitor that successfully ships an app) will be invited to use your application and judge it against the competition in the manner described below. No additional features or bug fixes are allowed during this period, or you will be disqualified. For full instructions on how to participate and contest requirements, see below.

Teams

Teams should be comprised of between one and four individuals. No more than four people are allowed on a team. To be eligible, teams must register during the specified registration timeframe (space subject to availability).

Source Control & Deployment

Your team will be provided with a free app and Git repository, courtesy of Heroku that you must use. As you develop your application, you should push your progress to the repository regularly (“commit early, commit often”) in order to demonstrate progress.

Optionally, you will have access to a Git repository courtesy of GitHub that will be linked to your Heroku app where you may also push to as a way to demonstrate progress.

However, at the end of the competition, your application must be deployed to Heroku at the given app. This is what will be judged.

Related to deploying at Heroku, the *.r15.railsrumble.com subdomained URLs we provide are the official URLs judges will be sent to. If you have a custom domain, you must still support requests coming into the subdomain URL we provide.

Building Native Apps

We ask that judges mostly consider the Ruby part of each entry and we ask that you write the most important parts of your entry in Ruby. It doesn’t have to be all Ruby, but this is a Ruby competition, so please use your best judgement.

We have also found that people are generally reluctant to download and install native apps during the judging period of the rumble, so take that into consideration. Additionally, not everyone uses iOS or Android or OS X. If you build a native app on a single platform, there will almost certainly be a percentage of people that are unable to try it, even if they wanted.

If you do build a native app, you may be asked to provide proof of commit history and access to source code to the organizers, as your native app’s code won’t be deployed to Heroku.

If you’d still like to build a native app, please take these details into consideration and disclose what was used to build each part of your entry in your team’s entry’s description, prior to the end of the competition.

Third Party Software

Third party software, in the form of RubyGems are allowed, even encouraged (if publicly available and allowed for the use intended by this contest). Please make sure to update your team profile once the competition has started, and list any third party libraries, plugins, or other applications that you make use of. Third party JavaScript libraries, Flash widgets, and other component libraries, are allowed. You must update your profile to list any external libraries that are in use and give appropriate credit and citations.

Stock photography, icon sets, and publicly available templates are allowed. Teams are prohibited from commissioning or otherwise paying for any content that is created specifically for the application as opposed to being publicly available for everyone’s use. Developing a plugin or library before the competition that provides your application’s general functionality is considered cheating. Developing a plugin or library that is publicly available and provides a general purpose publicly usable function (such as accessing an API) can be done before the competition begins. Purchases will not improve your chances of winning. This is a skill-based contest.

Your application can make use of any non-paid and publicly available third party web services. This means that services provided by established services such as Google, Yahoo, Flickr, Twitter, etc are all possible and allowable. For example, Pusher has a free tier, so it’s okay. For transactional email, try Mandrill by MailChimp, which also has a free tier. As before, make sure to update your profile to list dependencies on third party services and give credit to those services accordingly.

If you have a question about a particular piece of third party software, please contact competition organizers for clarification.

Ownership and Open Source

What you do with your application source code once the competition is over is up to you. Individual teams retain all rights, interests in, and title to the source code they create for this competition. If you choose not to open source your application that is within your discretion and has no bearing on your chances of winning this competition. There are no penalties for wanting to safeguard your source. We hope that a number of participants use this opportunity to launch disruptive ideas, or maybe even the first version of a software startup, and understand that sometimes part of a viable business strategy is keeping your application source code private.

Note that the competition organizers will have access to your code base throughout the competition, in order to make sure that no cheating occurs (as outlined previously). Competition organizers will not re-use or distribute such source code materials in any way, unless given explicit permission by the contestant.

Rails Rumble reserves the right to refer to your web-based application as promotion for this contest or future contests and may include your team name and other information contained in your registration for promotional purposes. Additionally information in your team profile will be available to peer judges and public judges. Please see our Privacy Policy for further details.

User Privacy

Many people, aka peer judges, and other visitors, will be reviewing and using your application during the judging period of the competition. In the interest of protecting their information, we’re imposing a non-optional privacy policy for the duration of the event. You are not to reveal any user information to any third party, except when required by law. You are not to use account emails for any purpose other than the standard operation of your application. If you choose to continue developing your application after the event has ended, you are required to notify users of any changes in your privacy policy, so they can remove the information if they so choose. For the duration of this competition you hereby agree to abide by the Privacy Policy of the Rails Rumble competition.

Judges: If you registered with Rails Rumble as a public judge, in the process of judging this competition, you may come into contact with personal, confidential or proprietary information of the contest entrants (teams). Be aware that by accepting the Privacy Policy, you hereby agree to abide by it and respect the confidentiality of the contest entrants.

Judging

There are limited spots available. Each team will submit a single entry. Spots are reserved by teams on a first come, first serve, basis.

Judging, will occur after the build portion of the competition is completed. Both qualifying competitor judges and public judges will pick their favorite entries and rank them, at the same time. Competitor judge rankings will result in the top ten overall winners. Public judges will result in a single “Public Favorite” award.

The judging period will take place from November 9th, 2015 until November 15th, 2015.

All judging will occur from the perspective of an average consumer / Internet end user. Meaning, code quality will not be judged. We believe code quality to be a highly subjective affair, and thorough reviews are extremely time-intensive and not in the best interests of this competition. Your application will be judged based on it’s visible merits. In particular, we ask judges to consider a number of aspects including: originality, usefulness, appearance, and completeness. However, these categories are not individually rated.

Each judge (both peer and public judges) will choose their favorite entries and rank them in order. We strongly encourage contestants to use development best practices but in the end judges are expected to rate applications based on their visible merits.

At the conclusion of the judging period, an overall top ten ranking (places 1 through 10), solely based on combined rankings from all competitor judges, will be revealed as the winners.

Public judges are members of the general public that have registered with Rails Rumble to participate in judging. Public judging will also occur from November 9th, 2015 until November 15th, 2015. These public judges will award a single “Public Favorite” award.

Further, a “Solo” award will be given to the team with a single member that has the highest competitor judged rank.

Organizers reserve the right to disqualify any team that is believed to be cheating or not competing in the spirit of the event, in their sole discretion.

Please note that Organizers, Competitor Judges, and Public Judges are not subject to any non-disclosure, confidentiality agreements, or additional privacy policies unless otherwise noted in this document.

Exact dates for judging periods are subject to change.

Prizes

As previously stated, this competition is open to everyone for participation (except for where prohibited), however, prizes from our sponsors may not be available to everyone based on geographic location and where prohibited by law. Please see below for details. All prizes that are granted and where provided are in the sponsors sole discretion. Rails Rumble is not directly responsible for the delivery of any prizes or awards.

The winners of this competition will be eligible to receive prizes as described on the prizes schedule. Prizes are only available where valid. For all participants, prizes are available at the sponsors discretion and where legally allowable.

Prizes are available for the following achievements:

1st Place - 10th Place: Awarded to the applications that receive the highest rankings from all competitor judge rankings, combined.

Best Solo: This special award is the best application developed by a one person team, calculated by competitor judges.

Public Favorite: This special award is for the application that receives the most favorites from public judges.

The available prizes from our sponsors is subject to change, so check back often.

All Federal, State and local taxes related to any prize are the responsibility of the individual winners.

The Winners of each prize above will be notified on November 16th, 2015. Each team will be contacted via their Rails Rumble account within one week of announcing the winners, concerning each award and the information required for retrieving the awards from the sponsors. All awards will be made available to the winners within three (3) months of November 16th, 2015 (subject to prize and sponsor restrictions).

Current Sponsors

Please see the list of sponsors for a full list of contest sponsors. The sponsors list is constantly growing and subject to change, so check back often.

Removal

If at any time you would like to be removed from the email list or have your account deactivated, please follow the instructions provided in the Terms of Service.

Winners List

For a list of the winners, please visit railsrumble.com. Such a list will be available after November 16th, 2015.

Administrator

The Administrator of this contest is Rumble Technologies, LLC - P.O. Box 823, Manorville, NY 11949.

Disclaimer

The Administrator of this competition, organizers, and any Internet access or service providers are not responsible for incorrect or inaccurate entry of entry information, human or other error, technical malfunctions, lost/delayed data transmission, omission, interruption, deletion, defect, line failures of any telephone network, computer equipment, software or any combination thereof, inability to access websites, or damage to a user’s computer system (hardware or software) due to participation in this contest. If the Administrators determine, in their sole discretion, that there is any suspected or actual electronic tampering with the contest or if technical difficulties compromise the integrity of the contest or if any non-compliance with the rules has occurred, the Administrators reserve the right to void the entries at issue and/or terminate the contest in its entirety. If the contest is terminated due to tampering or technical difficulties prior to its end date, notice will be posted at railsrumble.com and / or blog.railsrumble.com. ANY ATTEMPT TO DELIBERATELY DAMAGE THE CONTENT OR OPERATION OF THIS CONTEST IS UNLAWFUL AND SUBJECT TO LEGAL ACTION BY THE ADMINISTRATOR OR ITS AGENTS. Entries will be deemed made by the authorized account holder of the e-mail address submitted at the time of entry. The “authorized account” holder is the natural person who is assigned to the e-mail address by an Internet access provider, online service provider, or other organization that is responsible for assigning e-mail addresses or the domain associated with the submitted e-mail address. Any online entries submitted by automated means, or third-party, will be disqualified. Entries will not be valid until received by the Administrator.