Rails Rumble and working on internal projects
About two weeks ago, we participated in Rails Rumble 2008, a contest for Rails development teams all around the world, where they have to develop a fully functional version of an application in only a week-end.
The choice of the application was made free, and the rules specified that you had to be between 1 and 4 teammates, so we (JB and Nicolas) decided to work with our friends Steve Verlinden and Aurélien Malisart (both of them did an internship at Belighted during the summer).
We came up with LiveResto, a platform made to help restaurant owners build their website in no time (based on an idea from Steve and Aurélien). We added all the typical features for such a platform, like the possibility to build up a menu, post pictures of the restaurant, and let customers make reservations (even an iPhone version is available!). As we were 4 developers, we obviously worked more on feature completeness than on the design part of the site. However, we used some nice templates freely available on the web which made a good impression overall :)
We ended up 36th out of 130 participating teams (based on hundreds of public votes), which made us quite happy as we had no real expectations and this was more of an experiment for us. This is quite encouraging and we plan to participate in next year’s edition as well (this time, probably with a graphic designer ;-)).
On a more general note, this was a very motivating experience. We were quite impressed with what we could produce in such a short time lapse. The end result is that we have decided to re-use the concept of “2 days rumbles” to push forward the development of some internal projects which we haven’t really had much time to work on yet. Indeed, the problem of internal projects is that they are often delayed as they always have the lowest priority on the queue. The only way of making progress on such projects is to force ourselves to dedicate a certain amount of time where we are not working on anything else, which is of course often problematic as customers still need us during that time. What the Rails Rumble showed us is that 2 days is an ideal duration which allows us to have a lot of things done, without blocking our customer work for too long.
So we committed ourselves to make once in a while a 2 days iteration on an internal project, where, after each such short iteration, a rough – though functional – version of the project has to be made available for the public to provide some feedback. We will obviously post more information about this at the end of the first iteration, to share our findings on this way of working and let people tell us what they think :)
Continue Reading…Posted by Belighted on Nov 07, 2008