I participated in last weekend’s RailsRumble, my first time “rumbling”, it was a pretty awesome experience. Ray‘s team at Intridea had an opening and he asked if I wanted to join last week, I was like, why not. I’ve been doing paired coding with Ray for years now and I know we can easily pull it off in 48 hours. We also had Doug March, an awesome designer who helped with the design and layout of the app. Check out our app: MovieTwitvia

I don’t really have anything profound to say about the whole experience, but a few random things:

• Linode was awesome, I requested to install and boot to Ubuntu jaunty and I was able to ssh in pretty much instantly
• It took a while to get Github access, but that didn’t stop us to git init and start hacking
• I used Sprinkle to setup our Passenger stack, with a few small exceptions it worked flawlessly, we were able to `cap deploy` within half hour of the start of the competition. I thought about trying deprec but at the time of server setup I didn’t have Rails app setup yet so I went with Sprinkle, which I’ve used quite extensively at Inigral
• since our app uses Twitter authentication, I used mbleigh’s twitter app template, I had issues with one of his plugins in the past so I was uneasy using it, but I have to say it worked great for us
• We used Pivotal Tracker and planned out the features before the app. They fall nicely into Cucumber features after we started coding. Ray and I wrote Cucumber features and steps for all our model codes. We didn’t follow through with integration testing, mocking all that API stuff would’ve been a bit of a pain, and our app is pretty simple
• (pickler didn’t work for me, I think it doesn’t work with the version of Cucumber I used)
• Ray and I coded til 7am my time Saturday night (or Sunday morning), at that time our app was pretty much done, only major thing we had to do was to put in the reply box so users can reply to the question on our site directly. We were pretty pumped up and thought about working for a few more hours, but decided that it was probably better to get a few hours of sleep, so we can hack with better focus and more energy til deadline. It was a good decision, I got up at around 10:30 and hacked out that reply box pretty quickly
• I actually had to go to tomales bay state park for a BBQ so I had to leave at 2pm California time, Ray and Doug took care of the final touches and the verification steps, it was nice to have finished all features way ahead of time and we were able to fix bugs and try out the sites with a few friends before the end of the competition
• I found one bug in the code this afternoon, it’s very minor and probably won’t matter unless we get more than a certain number of replies for a given question 🙂

That’s basically all I have to say right now, if we get through to the public voting round, please vote for us!