Over the last weekend i participated with Alejandro González, Kilian Barrera and Carlos Urbin in the Rails Rumble contest.
Our team Horcon boys had the idea to develop a web application that helps you plan your trips with friends and family members. You can add destinations, plan activities to do every day, keep track of the estimated money you are going to spend during the trip, etc. The new spin on the site is that you can discuss and build the itinerary in a collaborative way, voting and deciding how long to stay in a destinations and which activities to do. Anyone can edit the trip, add comments, vote activities, or delete items, like in a wiki.
Before the competition we had two brainstorming sessions to decide which idea to implement and two other meetings to decide which features we would try to implement.
From the technical point of view, the lessons i have learned are:
- Finish all paper mockups before the competition, not during the competition
- Write all texts, etc. beforehand
- Write up detailed user stories for each feature, so things don't need to be discussed again every now and then
- Focus on less features, only the most important ones
- Use a solid base, which is well tested and bug-free. We ended up having to fix quite some bugs in our boilerplate
- Give up unit tests (from my POV very time consuming for a 48 hours competition) and focus on high level integration tests with cucumber. This kind of tests also relieve you from the pain of doing a lot of monkey testing
So we didn't make it into the final round but we are still happy with the result and we plan to keep the site running and improve it further so if you like traveling please stop by and try out our site http://triphq.net and feel free to follow it's twitter account http://twitter.com/triphqnet. We'll be moving the application from the Linode VPS to another server and we'll keep all data, so don't be afraid to sign up or enter any trips. We'll be also rolling out fixes and new features soon!