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This is a rails rumble ‘08 wrap-up post and will be in progress until November 1st

First things first

Use the first hours to generate a simple staging/production environment and forget about tuning the machine for the rest of the contest. We setup a Ubuntu distro on linode with ruby + all the gems + passenger on the first 5 hours and practically left the instance untouched for the rest of the rumble. Less time on system management, more time on app development.

Bootstrap the application with all the helpers you can.

We used bort to bootstrap the app and I think it was a great idea. We got signup + open id + users management almost for free and again redirect the time usually used for this tasks to the application core funcionality. This was pretty natural to us since it’s the same logic that we’re using with tog and its plugins.

KISS take two: Keep it speedy, stupid!

The Rails Rumble is a speed contest and this should be the principle you should keep in mind while burning the hours of the weekend. In these times we’re all developing with bdd/tdd methodologies and can be confussing and probably polemic to through away these practices, but I think that it’s really necessary. This is not a real project (although it can be the seed for a real one, like ostraka). You don’t have a month o even a week. You only have 48 hours and even the time you spend on deploys is really important.

I know many people can think that this is not the case and that same principles used on a month(s)-long project should apply to the rumble apps and maybe even have a good experience applying bdd/tdd to the contest so YMMV… but the focus it’s on quick-as-hell-build-up not maintinability-and-good-spec-test-ratio.

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