Building a Rails app in 24 hours

Last thursday December 11, Ryan and Jonathan challenged me to build with the team @ Koombea a rails app in 24 hours. With no hesitation I accepted this challenge, and quickly started drawing some database diagrams and basic use cases. There was no more planning or specs or nothing. Straight to the keyboard to fire up textmate.

I must admit, we had a head start, there are a ton of base rails apps you can start a project off with, we chose Bort, it includes a lot of useful plugins and basic configurations to give you a kick start.

Half a day went by, and we were almost done in core features, we were even searching using Thinking Sphinx! Later on I spent the next 6 to 8 hours branding, designing the layout and immediately building the front-end while the team worked on a few other features.

The Thursday workday was over, 8 hours work total. Then came along Friday with Bug fixes, a couple of new features and general testing. By night we were done.

Today (Monday) we prepped our server, deployed and started sharing the url.

I’m really proud to present Purple People Collective, a place open to former Yahoos! and others who have been laid off and are looking for projects and short term work.

Coverage in the blogosphere started a few hours after launch, check out:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/jobwire/2008/12/ex-yahoo-staff-launch-social-n.php

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20081215/attack-of-the-purple-people-meeters-an-ex-yahoo-helps-other-ex-yahoos/#

We already have a bunch of ex Yahoo’s and companies wanting to hire them! This has been an exciting day =)

Check out http://koombea.com for more of our work. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have a project you’d like us to build for you!