Railsday 2006 is over, and right before I go to bed and fall asleep for countless hours (to compensate for the fact that I haven’t slept at all during the last 48), I need to talk about what Railsday (a competition to develop a web-application, using Ruby on Rails, in 24 hours sharp) proves in terms of web development and innovation.

The power of small, agile teams

It is amazing what you can actually build in 24 hours with enough will and some prior knowledge of the technology (in this case, Ruby on Rails - which we’ve been using here at Webreakstuff since the first public release). All you need is a good idea, getting used to the constraint that you have 24 hours to develop it, and manage the project at a microscale. In this situation, management becomes a subsconscious concept - it’s not present, and development happens organically.

Webreakstuff is a 5-people team at the moment and 3 of us built WeRateStuff (mind the name, it does say “rate”) for this years edition of Railsday. We decided upon what to actually build about 2 hours before the competition began, and planned it over nachos and iced tea. Sometimes even the most gruesome of preparations can create pristine results. When the 24h clock started ticking, things started rolling more or less naturally, and the truth is, now that the time is up (and the application is done), we’re positively surprised with the result.

Innovating on strange constraints

When you think about the constraints for innovation, you usually don’t think of time. As a matter of fact, the amount of times you’ll be in a rush to create something brilliant in your life will hopefully be few or none. Innovation takes time, it evolves out of something as simple as a necessitity for someone.

Coming up with everything around a web-application in 24 hours (including planning, design, development and testing) isn’t that difficult. The tricky part is to go all out and create something amazing in that time (which is why I’m definitely waiting to see what comes out of this years’ batch of deliveries - and can’t wait to see what people think of our little app).

What we did, and why we’d do it again

As I’ve said previously, we built an application called “WeRateStuff”, which is (in just a few words), a social review-anything web application. It isn’t a novel idea, it isn’t completely new, but I for one don’t really like any of the current offers (which was one of the reasons why we did it).

“WeRateStuff” will be available online as soon as we get the time, outside of our client and consulting work, to polish it into a state we’re happy about - and if we get a good host for it (can you help? Get in touch, and thanks in advance). Meanwhile here’s the screenshot of how the application looks after our 24h journey of Railsday:

For a detailed screenshot, see our Flickr page. Now, I think I can say with some degree of certainty we’d do this again anytime (well, maybe not tomorrow because we’re so tired we can’t recognize ourselves in mirrors). And the reason is, constraints are good - and we were quite happy about the result of working under the right kind of creative pressure during 24 hours.

Railsday 2007, we’re ready. As for this years edition, we’re looking forward to seeing what other people came up with.

Siteblimp, the PPC application we developed for the guys at ACS, relies on the Google Adwords API to provide its service to the users. We previously wrote about the problems of depending on 3rd party APIs, but nothing in writing comes close to real experience. This (somewhat technical) post highlights some of the problems we faced during the development stage, in hoping to illustrate some of the issues you may run into working with code you don’t control.

From initial goals to reality

Siteblimp is a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign management web application with some innovative features. Initially, the goal was to support both Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) but for reasons we’re about to explain, Y! support was dropped. Still, we’ll highlight the advantages (and the many shortcomings) of both APIs and the companies behind them. (more…)

43 People is about to launch. By the same guys who’ve already delivered the great 43Things and 43Places (The Robot Co-op), this is one of the best applications of the “web 2.0″, because it connects people to people, and allows them to share little intimate details to the public, while not being “weird” about it.

Sometimes I wonder how many of the entrepreneurs working on the “next killer app” realize how much of the web 2.0 is about connecting people who are on the “edge” (of the “content publishing” world, that is) and allowing them to interact. This ability to connect people through services, transparently, is amazing, and something I personally think about a lot - and now even more, since the work I’ve been doing is all about this sort of stuff.

One concern of mine is how much social software out there packs no meaningful “social object” - you know, what connects two or more people (like photos on Flickr, podcasts on Odeo or videos on YouTube). The result is usually the same all the time - people get tired, they stop visiting or they leave. Plus, there’s the problem of not being connected to the social network all the time (you are not on, say, hi5 all the time - hopefully), eventually leading people to forget or ignore the software. The meaningfulness of the social object around which the social network revolves is extremely important. Too important to forget.

You’ve probably heard about the Robot Co-op (fantastic name, great minds) before. And even if you didn’t, maybe you’ve heard of 43Things, their project where people can create lists of stuff they want to do. So now they’re at it again, and this time, with locations. 43Places is their upcoming website for people who’re into, well, going somewhere (naturally).

In my recent discussions about social networks (that I’m exploring a lot lately) I got to the conclusion that locations as a social object haven’t been explored enough (mainly because Plazes isn’t even trying). So I admit i’m curious to see what they’ll be doing. Thumbs up.