This past weekend, several Redman staff members participated in the Rails Rumble, a 48 hour web application development competition using the Ruby on Rails framework. Teams of one to four people from around the world spent the weekend down in the web design and development trenches, working fast and into the early hours of the morning to design, build and deploy a working website from scratch. Not an easy task! Of the 300 teams that entered, only 181 managed to produce working applications.
Of the four Edmonton teams, two had Redman representation: the Codebucks team and the Weebeteurs team.
Both teams felt the 48 hour crunch, but persevered through the stress. As with any extremely tight deadline some functionality had to be cut from the initial release but both teams have plans for further development once the code freeze is lifted after judging.
Wee Bet
One of our staff teams created a social betting website called Wee Bet. The idea behind this application was to create a fun way to wager on the outcomes of sporting events and compare your betting accuracy with other people using points instead of money.
Currently the site only lets you bet on the outcome of NHL games, but the application can be expanded to include other sports, leagues and events. Bets can be placed and changed up until 1 hour before the start of the game, when all wagers are locked and the final payout odds are calculated.
Features Coming Soon to Wee Bet:
- Groups: Create groups to track and compare your betting skills, point totals and accuracy to people you know.
- Graphs & Analytics: Track your wagering accuracy and point totals over time to see if practice does indeed make perfect.
- Social Integration: Connect Wee Bet to your Twitter or Facebook account and celebrate your wagering prowess with all.
- Email Notifications: Opt in for a daily digest update once the final scores are logged and point payouts are complete.
Letitfree.me
The idea for Letitfree.me was to create a web portal that makes it easy for people to find and give away reusable items. There are a number of these “freesharing” and “freecycling” groups around today, but most of them revolve around mailing lists organized by area, which results in a lot of high volume email and doesn’t provide much in the way of search.
Letitfree.me allows users to approach freesharing in a new way, allowing people to create profiles, perform searches for items of interest in their area, and build reputation around their trade history.
Features Coming Soon to Letitfree.me:
- Saved Searches: Easily flag categories or save searches to more easily track items of interest.
- Reputation Tracking: Active users will be able to build positive trade feedback and reputations, or make note of users who miss scheduled trades or misrepresent items.
- More Item Information: Photo galleries, public questions with replies from the trader, “who liked this” lists and “recommend to a friend” features.
- Premium Features: Promote items you need to get out of your home quickly to the top of the list, and automatically “bump” postings to the top after a certain period of time.
Two other Edmonton teams competed in the Rails Rumble, and you can learn more about their applications on the YEGrby blog.
The Expert Judges are hard at work right now evaluating the 181 working Rails Rumble applications to narrow that number to a group of finalists. Public voting on the finalists will run from October 20 to October 22.
Good luck to all the Edmonton teams, and congratulations on all your hard work! We look forward to seeing these applications grow and develop in the coming months.
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