Rails Rumble 2012 - Winners Announced | Hacker News Reader

Rails Rumble 2012 - Winners Announced

railsrumble.com

63 pointsclowder24 comments

The winners of 2012 Rails Rumble have been announced, so go check them out!

Awesome. There was a little bit of discussion here about the winner (http://findthin.gs/) a few days ago at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4659320 .

I have to say that I was really surprised with the prizes described at http://blog.railsrumble.com/2012/10/13/prizes-prizes-prizes/ . It seems modest given the sheer scale of the event (500 teams) and the size of some of the sponsors. Our local start-up weekend awarded $20,000 in cash between the top three winners, in addition to a lot of free services, and the competition wouldn't be nearly as stiff.

There are other benefits though. The exposure, and the feedback from other participants/judges.

It seems modest given the sheer scale of the event (500 teams) and the size of some of the sponsors.

I think a couple of things come into play. It was far from guaranteed that 500 teams would actually sign up. The Rails Rumble didn't take place in 2011 and was fresh back this year. Also, I'd make a guess that having more sponsors reduces their interest in putting up more than they have to. If it were just a few, they'd get more out of it so might put up more goodies. Collectively, though, I think the prizes are pretty good.

(Disclaimer: I'm partly involved with the Rumble but am not involved with sponsorships at all and know no details.)

I think the prizes are actually pretty good considering the zero cost of entry. A local startup weekend I participated in had prizes that were far less than what was on offer for Rails Rumble 2012.

Wow, just amazing how much some people can do in such a short time. The winner's design is awesome http://findseri.es/tv_series/search

I was very impressed by that background animation for the first 10 seconds and then I got really dizzy. I think they should stop the animation a few sec after.

I really like the animation too. But I'm wondering why they chose to make a collage of movie posters if the search is for tv shows. Awesome nonetheless.

Check at the top on the front page or any of the show pages - there is an option to toggle to search movies as well.

Also the collage has an even mix of TV and movies. :)

Is this a jquery plugin or something that they created themselves?

Entirely home–grown CSS with transitions via Sass/Compass by the ever–wonderful http://levibuzolic.com/.

DeployButton (http://deploybutton.com) and Revision.io (http://revision.io) were my favorite.

Awesome, thanks a ton! Fixing up deploybutton now, hope to have some of the bugs worked out soon.

DeployButton was definitely my favourite too!

RR is always enjoyable.

UI issue: I found the descriptions hard to read. Too many things thrown at me, and the thing I want to see, the description, is in a small font and low contrast color.

My teammate and I agreed that the site needs some work and thought it would have been fun to Rails Rumble a new Rails Rumble.

so meta, I love it! (And also would be helpful for all future Rumbles.)

Agreed, although apparently this has been tried a few times without success. Do it next year!

We built http://planswiftly.com as our RR 12 submission.

After seeing the amazing entries that did win, we are humbled and inspired to try harder next time around. (And next time, we will absolutely hunt down a great designer)

Your design is veeeeery attractive. In fact, it was the one that stood out the most to me when I first looked through the entries. I'd love to "borrow" your mediocre designer

Congratulations to everyone involved. Also, many thanks to the organisers & judges, it was a blast!

One of the most interesting things to me about this is the listing of gems/plugins and APIs used for each entry. If it's all in a structured form, it'd be interesting to see a table/list of the most used.

In terms of API, just browsing through, I saw that the Solo winner (http://medpass.es) used a government drug pill identification API I'd never heard of before:

http://pillbox.nlm.nih.gov/index.html

From what I can tell, here are the most popular gems for the ten winners:

  haml (8)
  devise (6)
  coffee (5)
  sass (5)
  pry (5)
  sidekiq (4)
  mysql (4)
  honeybadger (4)
  simple_form (3)
  pusher (3)
  bootstrap (3)

It's pretty clear that haml/coffee/sass are just flat out winning, despite all the handwringing.

We used Slim for findthin.gs—it's faster, has much better whitespace control, and, imho, better achieves Haml's reduce noise, increase beauty aims. But there's no contest about Sass and CoffeeScript being amazing.

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