The above is a post written by the guys at Softies on Rails, and shared by one of the folks I follow on Google Reader. I took a screenshot of the shared post so that you can see the post in it’s original (shared) form, as the Softies guys have deleted it. While our team is a mere 55 on the Rails Rumble leaderboard (which you can help us with 
, I’ll explain how we were able to create a complete app in the allotted 48 hours.
- We did a lot of upfront planning (measured in days). This planning included creating wireframes (that couldn’t be made into digital assets), an ERD diagram (barely needed for our simple model), and conducting research into what pre-existing plugins, packages, and javascript libraries we would use.
- We used Bort as the basis of our application, which allowed us to focus on the core functionality of the application. Using a package like Bort was allowed, as it is freely available and open source.
- As an agile shop we applied agile techniques. We had a plan of action, user stories written and in our project management system, and we had a planning session before the competition to determine who would do what.
- We also had a team of four – one designer and three developers. Four people can do a lot in 48 hours.
The Rails community has grown a huge amount in a short amount of time, and it seems that within the past year, there has been a lot of development open sourced and shared within the community. This includes more Ruby gems, Rails plugins, and complete applications. This is allowing all of us to gain a leg up on our coding brethren and produce applications in record time.
The purpose of this post isn’t to berate the Softies guys. I do wish they would have left the post up so that the team(s) in question could respond on how they accomplished their apps in 48 hours. They might have great techniques that the rest of us could learn from.
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