September 15, 2009
Rails Rumble 2009: Third PrizeJonathan Erickson
With TableSurfing, you'll never have to eat alone again
The Rails Rumble is an annual programming competition where teams of up to four people will have 48 hours to build an innovative web application in Ruby on Rails. Once the build portion of the competition is over, a two-phase judging process selects the winning entries in several categories. In the first judging phase, a selected panel of experts reviews all qualifying applications to determine the top tier. Once they're finished and the top applications identified, the public judging period begins. The categories of winners include: Grand Prize, Second Prize, Third Prize, Solo, Appearance and User Interface, Originality and Innovation, Usefulness, and Completeness. Thanks to Nick Plante, Darcy Laycock, Erin Shine, and Jeff Rafter who organized this year's event.
Third Prize
The 2009 Rails Rumble Third Prize goes to the TableSurfing application, developed by Jelle Desramaults, Benny Degezelle, Jeroen Jacobs, and Jan De Poorter.
Figure 1: TableSurfing, by Jelle Desramaults, Benny Degezelle, Jeroen Jacobs, and Jan De Poorter
Jan, tell us about TableSurfing. What does it do?
TableSurfing is like CouchSurfing... but with food. People who don't want to eat alone, but do like to cook, can put up a table on the website, and spread the word through Twitter/FaceBook/.... People can then sign up for their table and have a fine dinner party. With TableSurfing, you'll never eat alone!
What tools did you use to build it?
Ruby on Rails, of course. And jQuery, Google Maps API, Geokit ruby gem, FB Connect, Textmate, A lot of paper, crayons, sweat, and tears.
What was the hard part in building TableSurfing?
We were kind of struggling getting the Facebook integration working as we wanted it, not having a lot of experience with the code/plugin was really hard. We also spent a lot more time then we tought we would on the intro movie.
In retrospect, what would you have done different?
We should have familiarized ourselves with the plugins we would use instead of just assuming FaceBook integration was easy. I think we had a better run then last year though, so I think we're going in the right direction ;-)
What's next with the app? Any enhancements, improvements in the offing?
At the moment we're all loaded at work (end of the summer), but we want to go ahead and do some minor updates first (Simplifying the table creation process, having more interesting local results, add RSS/Tags to follow). We also need a lot of test coverage, which we didn't get to during the Rumble. After all that it's not sure yet where we're going.
For More Rails Rumble 2009
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