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 2012 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! And 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.

There are a few things you should keep in mind:

• Spots are limited. Although registration is technically open until the 7th, 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 13th.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

Last but not least, we’re extremely happy to welcome a number of new sponsors that are helping to make the 2012 Rails Rumble happen. Please take some time to show your support and check them out!

• Linode
• GitHub
• Divshot
• Mandrill by MailChimp
• RailsCasts
• Sirportly
• Prefinery
• Honeybadger
• Jaconda
• Sticker Mule
• Basho
• Sprint.ly
• Codebase
• Deploy
• O’Reilly
• tddium by Solano Labs
• Code School
• JetBrains
• United Pixelworkers
• thoughtbot
• Pragmatic Programmers

If you need help with anything or have any questions, please feel free to contact the organizers. Otherwise, the competition starts on October 13th at 00:00:00 UTC, so don’t be late!

- @tsmango