Carlos Matallín

Rails Rumble ‘09

I know I had this pending SO MUCH time. But when I wanted to write about it I simply couldn’t find the words to express what I actually felt.

Last August (damn! we are in October now!) was celebrated the most famous competition in the Ruby on Rails community which consists in setting a functional webapp and deploy it in less than 48h: the Rails Rumble.

The spirit of it is very similar to iWeekend and they share a lot of things; however, besides similarities they are quite different starting by the number of components which can form the team: as much as four, which let you have some programmers and fewer designers.

I really felt like taking part in such an event while commiting (nice word, huh?) one of my new year’s resolutions, so I proposed this to Felipe Talavera one of my partners in the startup we cofounded almost a year ago Biblioteco. I’m not part of that project anymore but I really admire the work the developers did then in order to have everything up and running. With no doubt they are part of the elite spanish rails developers.

Anyway, I was talking about the Rails Rumble. I came up with this and he told me that they already had a team, the Mallorca team where I gently was invited.

What came after were 48 hours of real extreme programming and some glances of design work. I would like to make a deeper analysis about the importance that the interface had in the final polls or the feelings I had about not being able of putting in the par of the rest of the members but as I said before I don’t really know how to express this.

Which remains from this great experience is a great mail voting system, Letsdecide.us and some impressions like the fact that 4 people were more capable than 40 to have a fully functional webapp.

I also want to congratulate the other Spanish teams which I only can bow to their work:

• Lets Wadus
• Diversion
• Parlio

And a enormous thank to the Mallorca team to let me join: Rai, Felipe and Fer. I’m so grateful for such an experience!

Extra balls: Fernando Guillen also posted something about this + Photo album +  Video demo