- Oct
- 24
- 2008
How to build a Rails app in 48 hours
By: Robert Dempsey | Tags:
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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4 Responses to “How to build a Rails app in 48 hours”
On October 24th, 2008 at 8:34 am
Justin said:
I think the upfront planning and having a full team of 4, complete with a designer who is comfortable in the rails views, is a big reason why we, and probably a lot of other teams, could whip up a very complete application in 48 hours. It’s a shame that someone sees these and immediately assumes it is impossible, and therefore many of the teams were cheating. Even more of a shame that they then removed the post so no one could defend themselves against the accusations.
Also, rails itself plays a huge part in the speed. One of the original goals of the rails rumble as I understood it (besides embracing constraints) was extolling the ease-of-development when using rails.
But I guess one way of looking at all of this is if it looks like many teams must have cheated, that is ultimately a compliment to rails, and the teams involved.
On October 24th, 2008 at 10:07 am
jake said:
Softies on Rails is a classic ‘What have they actually built’ blog. Not sure why anyone should take them as an authority. They’re in that 1st wave of Rails Bloggers that capitalized on the lack of Rails info (in this case focused towards windows).
On October 24th, 2008 at 11:51 am
First Days with Rails - jake said:
[...] Fast forward to 2008 and the competition is still going on. This year, Rails Rumble 2008 was the place to be. A 48 hour competition to create the best Rails app EVAR! This year, as in all previous years, there was some baby mama drama… [...]
On October 24th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Thom Parkin said:
There is no way to properly “police” an event like this. The developer community has such a sense of camaraderie and ‘fair play’ it is distrubing to consider particpants might cheat.
One of the real drains on time and resources for our small (two man) team was the tedious process of creating a server instance on the VPS provided.
Having developed numerous Ruby on Rails sites on shared hosting it was unfamiliar territory. More so, it seems to be a bit out-of-scope for a DEVELOPMENT COMPETITION.
I would propose that the teams have a short period prior to the start of the competition to construct the server. We might not have completely lost our motivation when it was the 20-something hour and we were first able to FTP to the site.