After being absent last year, today I will start my participation in the Rails Rumble event. Together with a teammate we will try to finish a project within the next 48h, using the Ruby and its Ruby on Rails web framework. Personally I enjoy this kind of challenges, even though it’s not guaranteed that we will be able to finish anything. This was what happened 2 years ago when we weren’t able to finish our project, our final push had a bug that turned the application completely unusable. Even didn’t winning anything, we learned a lot and had some fun.
Later we continued working on that project for while, eventually we were able to enter other contests with it and obtained very good feedback. The application was called Payup and is still online (but it doesn’t work very well).
However the market for this kind of application already had many competitors, some of those more mature and well established. Our app had some flaws that needed to be fixed, with our day jobs and other projects we slowly let it die. But hey, it wasn’t bad for the work of one or two weekends.
Not every personal project either related to a hobby or from a challenge must necessarily be a huge success and be maintained forever, that is the great thing about these kind of projects, you do it, you succeed, or you fail, and you move on to the next one and keep learning new stuff. If you had to maintain every project or experience, you once worked on forever, you probably would lose the interest in starting new things, even if they were just for fun.
So today, we will do it again. I’m searching my list of ideas and discussing them with a teammate. A new ride is about to start…