Nicolas Alpi

Hi, Salut

Pragmatic web application developer, I enjoy my freelance way of life in my home office every day. I mainly use Ruby based frameworks (Rails / Sinatra / Rack) as my main development arsenal and jQuery is my day to day friend for every piece of client side. Aside from development freedom, I really enjoy the business side of behind freelance, and will soon to release my own personal application. In my free time, I enjoy cooking, runnning and sharing a coffee or a beer with people, so if you're around Bristol, let's be in touch.


Rails rumble 2008, finally manage to finish sheepfit

Rails rumble, this competition where Ruby on Rails developers were invited to code a web application in 48 Hours, is now over. Since today 00:00 GMT precisely.



I participated this year, and managed to develop a personal stretch reminder, called Sheep Fit. You can visit the application for the beta use here. The blog, with all the creation step was maintained during these 48 H by Nathalie Cacahuete.



**

How was it ?**



Very hard. I was alone for all the development and the design and the deployement process. So just a bit** **wired not to finish in time.



Because there were contestants from all over the world, the competition started at 00:00 GMT in the night from Friday to Saturday, and finished 48 hours later.



The first coding night was ok, but I was really too tired on the second night.

Lots of trouble with the app, with timezones (finally I had to go in rails 2.1 instead of 2.1.1 …) and with the Linode server. I really thanks Matt for the good advice he gave me**** : Go to bed 5 hours and come back to finish your application.



What did i learn ?



I have to write test …. really. I don’t write full application test usually, just a few and then that bores me. But this this experience made it clear to me : Tests are the key to develop productively. If you don’t write them** **you’ll lost and waste too much time resolving bugs which should not be there.



I’ve downloaded the 3 RSpec Peepcode videos and I’ll take time to look at them carefully.



Other developers were really cool. When I shared on twitter my fears about not finishing the application, I had plenty of messages pushing me to keep going and not to stop. Thanks you all.



**What was the best part ?



**

  1. Nathalie’s gingerbread :D
  2. Deploy the application and saw it live
What about the other applications ? You can find a list of rails rumble applications at 48hlaunch.com and at burm’s blog Some are really awesome. Personally : What about the future ? Well, I’ll see with the time if the idea of Sheep Fit can move into a new product. However, we are going to work now on 2 other projects. One project will be announced in next week, so click here to subscribe to the RSS *feed.**

**

Really big thanks**** to Nathalie who supported me all the weekend … brave girl ;)

Photos ?

Nathalie’s gingerbread :

Man at work :


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