My Favorites From Rails Rumble 2010

This year’s Rails Rumble just finished. It’s a 48-hour sprint for small teams to whip up a Ruby on Rails app. As expected, the apps this year were even more gorgeous, more polished, and more amazing-er than last year. I didn’t get to participate this year, but you better believe I can armchair quarterback my favorites to you.

There’s about five million apps this year that I was impressed with, but here’s a couple that I was really impressed with, in no particular order. I definitely encourage you to browse the whole list of teams; there’s a lot of interesting apps tackling some unique problems in there.

Remember… all of these were done in 48 hours or less, which is kind of insane.

Boarrd

Boarrd is an app that I’ve wanted to do for some time; it’s basically a status board that lets you set up self-contained widgets on a page. Great design, and they have 18 widgets to start out with (ranging from Flickr streams, to Twitter searches, to GitHub project snapshots). Super easy to use, and something that doesn’t seem all too hard for them to ferociously build out new widgets into the future.

Splendid Bacon

Splendid Bacon’s pretty splendid. Simple project tracker somewhat akin to Cultured Code’s status board. It works with GitHub post-receive hooks, too, which makes it probably the hottest thing since sliced butter.

Owe Me Cash

Keep track of who owes you what. Simple. Basically I fancy myself a mobster sometimes, and sometimes you need to break a few kneecaps.

Playbill

Playbill’s a quick way to find out what’s going down in your city of residence tonight. Cool design, one text field, embedded maps, what’s not to like? Nothing, that’s what. Nothing’s not to like.

And a bunch more.

The Rails Rumble (and other blitzkrieg app events like it- nearly every language and framework has one now) is just fun to watch. It’s fun to be excited about web development sometimes. These cats built some cool apps in two days, some of which will go on to become full-fledged apps or businesses. That’s awesome.

Sure, a button may not work, or the design may not be up to snuff, or there may not be the feature you want in a particular app. None of that matters in competitions like these. It’s the journey we should applaud.

And if you’re still some sort of bitter internet commenter after all this, well, shut the fuck up, lace up your boots, and step in the ring next year. :)

Cheers! And don’t forget support your favorites on October 21, when the round of public voting starts.