Rails rumble 2008, finally manage to finish sheepfit
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 ?
- Nathalie’s gingerbread
- Deploy the application and saw it live
You can find a list of rails rumble applications at 48hlaunch.com and at burm’s blog
Some are really awesome. Personally :
- I really liked the feature comparison table of justafinlist
- The first page of wantanom
- Nathalie likes to play with sellyourattention
- The Lyriscist logo is nice
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 :
Hi Nic, congrats for Sheepfit ! it was fun to watch you struggle, fight, cry, and finally be happy with the result ! It changed from watching the financial crisis :-0
Interesting comment on writing test. This is totally counter intuitive to me ! I believe in tests to increase code quality, maintainability, and avoid recurring bugs. However I absolutely don’t see this as a way to speed up development, I especially in a competition like this one. My mantra would be: write as fast and as dirty as possible, refactor when the competition is over
Looking forward to read on your experience with TDD !
Thanks for the comment, and for the keep going message
I assume that BDD will be able to improve my code productivity by adding a pre problem solving before coding the rules.
The problem with writing as fast as possible, even if it’s dirty (what I’ve nearly done) is when problems appear. Debugging take twice time than coding so : 1- you lost precious time and 2- you’re not sure that you’re patch locked all the problems.
Well let’s see for this future development, I’m looking for a good teaser idea