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

Four is a beautiful number

This year for ostraka just two of us (alberto and me) works on the development side of the rumble. Joel, our xhtml/css guru, helped us for some hours with some layout magic based on my designs and the amount of things we got done still seems unbelievable to me. But I think that for a totally out-of-world experience (the one we’re going to have next year XD) we need a full 4 members team. 1 designer, 1 xhtml/css guru and 2 developers should work great.

Don’t micromanage the fucking thing

You just have to trust your partners in this adventure. There is no time for tickets, meetings or review-after-review design acceptance process. Just write down a few keypoints and assign them between the team members, then get out the way and trust your partners. They’ll work better without interruptions and get tons of stuff done on a few hours. Just trust them.

A clear vision

The most important single resource you can have before rumble starts its a clear vision of what you want to build. We’ve been playing/dreaming about the concept of ostraka for a few months (nearly a year) before the rumble arrives so the features and the main focus of the site was clear on our minds. When the time arrive you shall not be asking yourself what your application do.