Oct 18
Rails Day 2006 Winners
Best Overall
- Freckle (#65) by Amy Hoy and Bryan Wood.
- Good to Garden (#40) by Will Emigh and Rory Starks.
- Cuppin (#33) by Peat Bakke and Raymond Brigleb.
Best Solo Project
- Rails Wishlist (#174) by Hampton Catlin.
Best User Interface
- WeRateStuff (#18) by Frederico Oliveira, Tiago Macedo and Pedro Eduardo Lemos Freitas.
- D20 Online (#47) by Tom Leiber, Jeff Mickey and Javier.
- C.umul.us (#59) by Jae Hess.
Most Creative
- Awesome Ninja Game (#182) by Tobias Lutke, Cody, and Daniel.
- Family Book (#19) by Lucas Carlson and John Butler
- Roomind.us (#119) by Dominic Damian, Ben Myles and Chris Abad.
Most Useful
- Heartbeat (#103) by Charles Brian Quinn and Derek Haynes.
- Regex Tutor (#61) by Ryan Bates.
- Profilr (#84) by Terence Haddock and Mark Chadwick.
Note: We restricted each project to winning no more than one prize. To do this, we gave winning projects the best prize to which they were entitled and then eliminated them from consideration for the rest of the prizes.
Congratulations to all the winners and also everyone who competed! Thank you to the judges and sponsors who made this possible! I’ll be following up with the winners via email to arrange getting the prizes to the right places.
Because of my excitement and in the interest of getting this post live ASAP, I’m probably forgetting all sorts of important details. Expect follow up posts for anything I missed.
Sep 22
Server moved, and I'm not fleeing to Mexico
The server for the Rails Day site has been moved and the last few days have been spent converting the site to Mephisto to enable that process. Now that we’re (mostly) transferred over, here’s an update on the situation:
- I’m not moving to Mexico with any prizes. Actually, I don’t have any of the prizes. You can come look in my apartment if you want. Nor have I thrown in the towel on this whole thing.
- I’d like to deeply thank Geoff Grosenbach and David Verba, who both judged entries and got me their picks for the contest.
- Thanks to Geoff and David, we’re down to a short list of teams which we will take some time to rank within the categories and give us the final results ASAP.
- The app controlling registrations is down due to the server move, and it will be restored as soon as results are posted.
- We’re working to fight against comment spam as much as possible. Some of the old articles got hit very hard, but new one’s should be okay.
I apologize for the lack of communication and results on this. This was my (Bryan’s) fault, not anyone else’s. In the end, Rails Day just kind of got too big for its own good. It’s almost over, but if you guys could keep the (somewhat deserved) bashing toned down a bit, it would help me feel a little better in the mean time.
Aug 8
Judging status update
By now, many of you have probably noticed that we missed our goal of having Rails Day results out by Friday. For this we apologize. Please allow me to explain.
In the last few days, three of our eight judges have stepped down due to lack of time.
We thank the remaining judges for sticking with us, but they are also experiencing constant pressure on their schedules just like you and me. In short, they haven’t been able to properly evaluate the Rails Day entries yet, and they need more time.
To help the situation, Geoff and I will both be removing our own entries from consideration and taking the role of judges.
Finally, given this delay, the User Experience Week 2006 (scheduled for August 14-17) prize will have to be removed from the pool, and the prize packages will need to be tweaked a little. This is of no fault of Adaptive Path, and they have been nothing short of fantastic to work with as a sponsor.
Aug 1
Results Coming Soon...
The judges have been working hard and I hope to announce the results by Friday.
Some math:
100 projects * 15 minutes = 25 hours of judging
Jul 7
Pimp my Prize Packages
Bryan has asked me to organize the final judging for this contest.
There are so many prizes, and over 100 qualified teams! I sent out the judging packages to the judges tonight and hope to give them a few weeks to gnaw on all the entries until the most deserving ones make their way through all eight of their craniums.
In the meantime, here are the way the prize packages have been divided…
Best Overall:
- Grand Prize
- MacBook Pro FiveRuns
- TextMate license MacroMates
- Mockingboard logo design Futuretrack5
- 2nd Overall
- Intel Core Solo Mac Mini CollectiveX
- TextMate license MacroMates
- Half-year of free dedicated hosting Slingshot
- 3d Overall
- Intel Core Solo Mac Mini ALTERthought
- TextMate license MacroMates
- XHTMLized service Futuretrack5
Best Solo Project:
- Free hosting for life Steel Pixel
- $100 cash Pluron
- Half-year fluxiom Pro account wollzelle
- TextMate license MacroMates
- Half-year Stikipad Power User account Stikipad
- Life2Go iPod software Kainjow
Best User Interface:
- First
- 60 GB Video iPod Ma.gnolia
- Free pass to User Experience Week 2006 Adaptive Path
- Life2Go iPod software Kainjow
- Second
- Nintendo DS Lite Futuretrack5
- Half-year fluxiom Pro account wollzelle
- Life2Go iPod software Kainjow
- Third
- 1 GB iPod Nano Steel Pixel
- $150 iTunes gift certificate Stikipad
- Life2Go iPod software Kainjow
Most Creative:
- First
- $500 gift certificate RightCart
- Half-year fluxiom Pro account wollzelle
- One-year subscription to Valleyschwag Rubyred Labs
- Life2Go iPod software Kainjow
- Second
- $200 Starbucks gift card Rails Forum
- Half-year fluxiom Pro account wollzelle
- One-year subscription to Valleyschwag Rubyred Labs
- Life2Go iPod software Kainjow
- Third
- $150 Think Geek gift certificate Fingertips
- One-year subscription to Valleyschwag Rubyred Labs
- Life2Go iPod software Kainjow
Most Useful:
- First
- Twelve books of your choice The Pragmatic Programmers
- Half-year fluxiom Pro account wollzelle
- TextMate license MacroMates
- One-year of Small Biz hosting package A2 Hosting
- Life2Go iPod software Kainjow
- Second
- Nine books of your choice The Pragmatic Programmers
- Half-year Big account 16bugs
- One-year of Small Biz hosting package A2 Hosting
- Life2Go iPod software Kainjow
- Third
- Four books of your choice The Pragmatic Programmers
- One-year of Small Biz hosting package A2 Hosting
- Half-year Big account 16bugs
- Life2Go iPod software Kainjow
And now for a shameless plug: I’ll be in London in early August teaching a Two Day Rails Workshop for Carson Workshops (at the luxurious Energy Clinic). I also plan to stop by the London Ruby Users Group on August 8 and hope to see some of you there!
Jul 5
SVN dumps are available
It took too long (and I can only blame RailsConf for part of that), but SVN dumps for Rails Day competitors are now available online.
To get them, visit:
http://contest.railsday2006.com/svndumps/team1.dump
Substitute your team number for “1” if you want your teams dump instead of mine.
Enjoy.
Jun 20
Watch Rails Day in two minutes
Bryan Lewis, one of the owners of Fusionary set up a time lapse camera to document our team’s Rails Day adventures. Things to watch for:
- Bawls consumption. We polished off about about 32 by the end of the thing. At some points, we resorted to Sugar Free Bawls (yuck!).
- My incredible spinning sausage McMuffin wrapper. I don’t know what happened there.
- Various crazy poses in front of the camera. Dan T. loves the camera.
- The sunset against the far wall. Beautiful.
- My co-worker changing my desktop background to a photo of me sleeping. (See the evidence.)
Check it out.
Jun 18
Rails Day is over!
It was great. Now what?
- Check out the final changeset stats at http://spectate.railsday2006.com/. Don’t mind the black hole around 1pm when the loging stuff crashed.
- Update your information in the registration system with a description of your app, and links to a demo, screenshots, etc. Also, feel free to post links to what you did in the comments.
- We’ll be turning on anonymous SVN read-only access for all the projects repositories tomorrow.
- Results will not be out for at least three weeks. Sorry it takes so long, but the main reason is we want to give all apps a fair shot.
- Catch up on some sleep.
Jun 16
Introducing the Rails Day judges
- David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of Rails. DHH is a partner at 37 Signals, co-author of Agile Web Development with Rails, and winner of the Google/O’Reilly Open Source Award for Best Hacker of 2005.
- Chad Fowler is a leading figure in the Ruby community. He’s the author of the newly-released Rails Recipes, co-founder of Ruby Central (organizers of RubyConf and RailsConf), and a respected Rails speaker and instructor.
- David Verba is Director of Technology for Adaptive Path, a leading web consultancy. He was a core developer for O’Reilly’s CodeZoo, and helped lead Measure Map to its aquisition by Google.
- Marcel Molina Jr. is a prolific contributor to Rails. He’s one of the 37s and one of the most helpful voices on the #rubyonrails IRC channel (as noradio). He regularly contributes to the Rails blog and Projectionist.
- Florian Weber serves the Rails Core team from Hamburg, Germany. One of the earliest Rails adoptors and most consistent contributors, his day job involves running the BellyButton online store.
- Thomas Fuchs is the creator of script.aculo.us, and is a partner at wollzelle (developer of fluxiom) and contributor to Agile Web Development with Rails. His sharp technical chops and refined aesthetic sense make him a valued member of the Core team.
- Scott Raymond (that’s me) works for Firewheel Design developing their Blinksale and IconBuffet applications. Scott wrote an article on Rails for the current issue of Linux Journal, and will release a book on Rails/Ajax development with O’Reilly later this year.
- Nicholas Seckar, another Core team member, has contributed countless enhancements to Rails, not the least of which being the original implementation of Routes. He is currently completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, while also working for Google, where he continues his work developing Measure Map.
