Chronicling my experiences with ruby on rails, web application development/management.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Weekend Rails Challenge #1

Thanks for participating in the first ever Weekend Rails Challenge.


The rules are simple for this challenge:
You have 48 hours to code a "For-Profit" based rails app using the twitter api. Also your app must have a colour scheme revolving around the following hex code #7C6D8A. Lastly you app Must be online and useable, hosted by yourself of course on your vps slice or node.
The challenge will run for a month and a winner will be chosen based on the app which gains the best combined score based on five different criterion.


Judging the winner



The winning app will have demonstrated the best TOTAL score of the following criteria:


  • (20%) Quality of Code - Following the rails mantra of DRY and readability, a mark will be given to you based on how well your code follows these coding principles. Usually you would test along the way but we've decided that in 48 hours that is not mandatory for this challenge.

  • (20%) Site Popularity - The site with the highest Alexa ranking at the end of the month will receive a full 20 points, 18 for the second best rank, down to 12 for the worst ranked site. 5 bonus points are rewarded for a mention in twitters sidebar menu (located below the profile of a twitter user)

  • (10%) Site Look and (10%) User Interface/Interaction - The site with the best looking and most functional user interface will gain top points in this category. Places 2nd, 3rd, and 4th will recieve 2 points less then the preceding ranking

  • (20%) Revenue made in a month - The site with the most revenue made during the month will gain top points in this category. Places 2nd, 3rd, and 4th will recieve 2 points less then the preceding ranking.

  • (20%) Most Creative Use of the given rules - An app that demonstrates the most creative and functional use of the given rules will gain top points in this category. Places 2nd, 3rd, and 4th will recieve 2 points less then the preceding ranking.




How will the scores be judged?


No idea, but i know that we participants will vote and we'll ask someone or a few people from ROR to vote on things like coding, site look and feel and creativity.


Submission Deadline:


We'll report back who ends up in the final challenge eventually, but if you want to enter, you MUST post a comment below regarding the purpose or solution you came up with for your app by 12 noon, as of you own time zone, on Saturday April 4th.



Good Luck Challengers


Best of luck and hey who knows... you could get a great money making app out of it. At worst, you made some new friendships and had a good weekend coding and learning.

7 comments:

  1. Yo Yo Yo,
    i'm tired and jet legged, but i'm fighting!
    idea: Twitter rooms (a.k.a IRC channels like rooms for twitter).
    Question, we need to put it online too? :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm in this. My submission is coming along fairly well. I'm grabbing a nap, but have my alarm set to come back and post the purpose of my app.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I too am in :-), and here is my submission: Tweet Response storage and analysis. All i can say right now, but think polling/story telling meets twitter meets data analysis meets data storage.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sounds interesting @nerbie69, can't wait to hear more. My submission is a playable game with a horror-genre spin. It's now 11:56a central time on April 4.

    ReplyDelete
  5. careful if you use twitter.friendship_exists? -- check my lighthouse ticket for more info.

    ReplyDelete
  6. the colour was randomly picked, it doesn't have to be the main colour, but more a show of unity between the three apps. again, just something fun and a wink wink, between all of us.

    ReplyDelete