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

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 :

• 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 :

A happy week is coming.

Last week I was really busy. A lot of work in my day job, and a lot of work at home on the travelplanner.

I’m now really proud to annonce that Nathalie, my partner, will help me in the launch of the two projects.

What are these 2 projects?

    The first one is a travel planner. The blog and a launch page will be open this week.
This travel planner will help you creating, discovering and sharing you future journeys.
A very cool application, with a mobile and an Iphone access (in preparation).
The blog will be a beautiful blog, with gorgeous travel photos and travel tips, as well as focuses on some travellers

    The second application will be our RailsRumble application. SheepFit.
Just a cool way of not forgetting to take your eyes off the PC (or the MAC) sometimes.
And if you’re very inspired, you’ll also be able create your own stretching programme, and hope for having a lot of persons following you
The blog will be a fun blog, with some cool strench advice, and some tiredness killer tips.

What are going to be the 2 roles?

    I’m a developer, with a geekly nerd view on marketing things. But Nathalie, is a marketing lover. She studied marketing in France, and after worked for 10 month in Lafarge     Plasterboard, she is now looking for a fun job in or around Bristol, Uk. (Take a look to her cv)

    So, Nathalie will be in charge of the Blog and News, and all the marketing/communication stuff.
During the rails rumble, she is going to update the blog, hour by hour, keeping you up-to-date with the state of the application during its creation. Brilliant idea.

    I’ll be in charge of all the technical posts on these blog, and on all the Ruby on Rails development.

How can you help us delivering new cool web apps?

   The first thing you can do is subscribe to this blog RSS (click here)

   The second thing you can do is follow our projects on twitter. We opened the sheepfit twitter account today (Follow Sheepfit)

   The third thing is  spread the word about these applications and blogs ;).

   Thank you very much for your support, we are looking forward to hearing from you on these ideas. The sheepfit blog will be open tonight, stay tuned.