All I can say is Wow!

Rails Day, the Aftermath

(If you don’t know what rails day is, look here: Rails Day Blog. It is a 24 hour contest to implement a web application in Rails.)

Obviously I can say more than wow. I don’t have a lot of time, so just a few quick points here.

• Don’t try to setup your brand new Mac-mini for Rails Day if you’ve never used it for developement and are not that familiar with Macs in the first place. Not that Macs are a poor development machine, far from it! It’s just a poor decision to “try out a Mac” the morning of Rails Day. I wasted way too much time trying to get it configured. I finally switched back to my trusty laptop.

• Favorite quote of the day: I heard this from the other Rails Day team in the room with us:

Person 1: I think we should use transactional testing.

Person 2: I agree. Just a second … I want to watch you set it up. (He then turns back to his machine to finish a commit. He returns in a few seconds). Ok, I’m ready.

Person 1: Oh, I’m done already.

Person 2: Damn! That’s what I hate about Rails. You blink and you miss something.

• Ha! We way overplanned our application. John started at midnight and implemented the DB schema we talked though in our planning meeting. When we started connecting things up, we discovered that is was way more complicated than what we could accomplish in one day, so we ripped out the extra stuff and concentrated on the features that we were working on at the moment. Eventually we might need the complexity, but it was only getting on our way. YAGNI!

• Thanks to Fusion Alliance for procuring the Room. It was perfect for our needs (well, except for a distinct lack of power outlets ... we had to bring in a few extra power strips).

• Thanks to Lisa Kaminski (SARK) for the fruit basket and the Pizza.

• Although we didn’t get everything done, we did get to put in some AJAX like features. That’s the first time I have played with AJAX and Rails does a really nice job of making it easy.

• Here’s our stats:

+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Name                 | Lines |   LOC | Classes | Methods | M/C | LOC/M |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Helpers              |     9 |     8 |       0 |       0 |   0 |     0 |
| Controllers          |   148 |   126 |       4 |      21 |   5 |     4 |
| APIs                 |     0 |     0 |       0 |       0 |   0 |     0 |
| Components           |     0 |     0 |       0 |       0 |   0 |     0 |
|   Functionals        |   189 |   148 |       6 |      26 |   4 |     3 |
| Models               |   170 |   133 |       4 |      26 |   6 |     3 |
|   Units              |   175 |   142 |       3 |      28 |   9 |     3 |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Total                |   691 |   557 |      17 |     101 |   5 |     3 |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
  Code LOC: 267     Test LOC: 290     Code to Test Ratio: 1:1.1

• Note to self: Next year have practice run to smooth out the kinks.

• Teams in Cincinati:
  • Team 1 (JEWEL … personal food log)
    • Jim Weirich
    • John Wilger
    • Rob Biedenharn
  • Team 2 (Photo album/organizer)
    • Scott Barron
    • Doug Alcorn
    • Mark Windholtz

• Mark brought in a couple bottles of Ruby Sake, which we used to celebrate the end of the run.

Had a great time … I suspect the other teams did too.