25th
Rails Rumble 2009: The competition
So… it happened, the last weekend was the Rails Rumble, a really kick ass event that made me squeeze all my skills and drop all my social life for 48 hours. I learned a lot of lessons (some the hard way).
The Event Organization.
The competition organization was OUTSTANDING, starting with the registration/team page, everything worked really well. At the competition, the little details stand out pretty quickly, and they made me laugh a lot. Big brags for you guys.
I’ve read the post from the intredia guys, it got me thinking that it will also be a good thing to share some “Good Idea, Bad Idea” thougths (of course, I’m not going to repeat what they have told you already).
1. Good Idea: Know your plugins
For the love of God, be sure that the plugins you are planning to use actually do what you are expecting them to do. It happened that I wanted to do (and at the end DID!) a twitter authentication for the system, I didn’t wanted to use TwitterAuth because it is to invasive, it assumes things, makes a lot of stuff and I don’t feel comfortable with it.
I thought.. “Gee this oauth-plugin looks awesome, and it has support for Twitter too!”, what I found out after actually trying to use it (on the rumble) was that it is not intended to do authentication, it’s intended only to use the Twitter API via oauth.
Don’t get me wrong, the plugin is AWESOME in what it does, It was actually my fault because I didn’t pay attention to their README when they said:
It requires an authentication framework such as acts_as_authenticated, restful_authentication or restful_open_id_authentication
At some point, I didn’t assume that the purpose of the plugin didn’t include authentication. So remember, think it twice before using planning to use plugin you don’t know that well (a.k.a used before).
2. Bad Idea: Don’t use an editor that you are still learning how to use.
This recommendation has a little bit of it’s history, it turns out that since 3 weeks ago, I dished Textmate in favor of Vim (Don’t throw tomatoes at me please!, I don’t regret it, say whatever you want :-p), Textmate is awesome, but when I started to use Vim, I felt all the love right away (after customizing a little bit of course).
The problem was that, to use this editor you need to learn and use a lot of commands. At Sunday afternoon, when your brain is starting to throw SEGFAULTS because you haven’t slept that well, the Vim goodness didn’t flow (I guess this happens when you are still thinking on the commands before actually using them on normal basis).
3. Good Idea: Provision your workspace with all the fast food, energy drinks and snacks you can suffice.
You know it, body needs food to do it’s thing… FullThrotle drinks kept me up on night time.
4. Bad Idea (If you are actually planning to win): Go without a sys-admin and a designer
The perfect balance is 2 proficient Ruby coders, 1 sys-admin, and a Heck of a good designer, with that you should have all your needs covered (ah… and of course a good project to do).
Besides that I have a really good war story related to ActiveRecord callbacks caveats (I will have a blog post for this soon, promise), and the post-mortem evaluation of Paperback for judges, the app that we intended to create and partially did.
Thank you RailsRumble team for such a fun and great time, I had a blast… see you next year.
