A typical work day is about eight hours give or take. How much time you’re really working inside that eight hours varies from person to person and the quality of work and amount of work definitely varies hugely. The question is, given 48 continuous hours and an idea you wanted to work on what could you achieve?
Taking an application from inception to release inside 48 hours is a laughable proposition to most but this year that’s exactly what a number of people did using Ruby on Rails. It’s an annual event these days called Rails Rumble where teams get together for a weekend and plan, develop and deploy their ideas as applications. The main rules are that it’s developed in it’s entirety onsite, inside the 48 hour period and is done in Ruby on Rails. Teams are small with four being the upper limit allowed.
A list of applications by category was posted here and to be honest there are some truly great ideas. The websites range from comical to serious in style and meet the needs of people, persons and businesses in a wide variety of areas.
Winners that I’ve checked out are :
WantNom – fun site aimed at making getting your friends together for dinner simpler.
Redminutes – a pretty basic site, but the idea is about making collaboration on small notes much simpler.
Couldya – basically using social networking to ask people to do things and track how the task is going. It’s an example of what I think is a reasonable idea that has a lot of implementation to go.
HikedIt – a social networking site dedicated to people that hike and get around outside. It looks very polished and I have a friend who’s been talking about a site kind of like this for ages. Done in 48 hours.
That’s just four of the apparently 200+ applications that were developed to some extent, whether partially or completely finished.
I think the main thing to see here is that all of these applications were developed inside 48 hours by up to four people and to be honest the ones I’ve clicked around that interested me were all more than useable and solved a problem I wanted solved. Could you do this with other languages? Perhaps, but having used a few frameworks myself (ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, Rails) I don’t think any of them come close for rapid development like this.
It makes me excited that we have rolled out a major application recently using Ruby on Rails and that there are still parts of the industry that are fun right now.
Yea you’re right some are awsome, (I like your selection) but don’t forget that some contestant were doing alone. No designer or extra coder for extra features, that’s why some are less functionally complete than other.
You’re right Spyou – I think there was a limit of four team members, but obviously some people were working on their own.
[...] written about Rails Rumble previously, the 48 hour event where teams turn an idea into a web application using Ruby on Rails. I was [...]