Shawn on the net

While I’m rethinking OpenBounty I figured another code race would help clear my mind.

GossipInto.com will be my latest attempt at a Facebook application.  I’ve made some small ones previously but not I was happy enough with to release to the world.

The idea of GossipInto.com will be to allow people to gossip and view gossip about their facebook friends anonymously.  I’ve had the domain for a long time as I bought it for a joke site to do with a Toronto social network years ago.

Site: GossipInto.com

Deadline: Sunday August 31st at 1pm GMT+10

Goals:

1. Ability for users to submit gossip and tag people in it.

2. Ability for people to search gossip by user

3. Ability for people to vote on gossip to confirm/deny it

4. Ability to tag gossip by type and browse based on that too

So openbounty is now functionally complete.  I’m going to spend the rest of my deadline time polishing some parts. In doing the first version I’ve already come up with a number of features I’d like to see in version 2 but I am staying mostly focused on the task at hand.

These races have been doing a lot to keep me focused and have really improved my ability to deliver my own projects on time.

I completed my first race around 8pm on Friday.  I just have to deploy the site now to one of my servers and get started writing the reviews.  In the end I built the site on rails since I’ve been doing a lot of work in PHP lately and wanted a change.

From start to finish I probably spent about 8 hours on the site which I think is pretty good.  The site is nothing complex but the admin panel allows me to add t-shirts very quickly by automatically fetching images from the web and creating the thumbnails using RMagick. 

I also built a basic click tracking system into it that I can extend with proper reports as time permits and traffic requires.

I bought the T-Shirt Judge site a while ago intending to build a t-shirt rating/review site.  I started it, then ran into some problems with my software which I soon ditched with the intention of rewriting it.  There’s my first mistake and I’ll write about my problems with scorched earth development in a future post.  I’ve set the deadline for this site to be very soon as I already have a good idea of the design and there isn’t that much functionality.  Wish me luck!

Site: tshirtjudge.com

Deadline: Saturday August 2nd at 1pm GMT+10

Goals:

1. Ability to add, rate, and review tshirts

2. Ability for users to comment and rate shirts

3. Comment moderation

I’ve had a lot of extra time to code lately but I find myself going in circles bouncing between projects so starting today I’m going to start code racing.

What I mean by code racing is picking a site, setting a public deadline here then working my ass off to get a working version live by the deadline.

The deadlines will be extremely tight.  I will be working extremely hard, but I’m going to be working smart too.  At the start of each race I’ll pick a site, set the deadline, the set of goals and get started.  At the deadline I’ll be putting up finishing post detailing how I faired, and issues I ran into and what not.

So without further wait.  The first race starts tonight (Which is probably a bad idea since I have to leave in an hour for a party but I’m not scared).