---
title: The thoughtbot Office Was A-Rumblin'
teaser:
tags: news,web
author: Mike Burns
published_on: 2009-08-24
---

The [Rails Rumble 2009](http://r09.railsrumble.com/) was just this
weekend and the thoughtbot office was packed with competitors, including two
non-thoughtbot teams! Here's the breakdown:

## [Photo Bagel](http://photobagel.r09.railsrumble.com/)

A deliciously-named app written solo by [Chap
Ambrose](http://www.chapambrose.com/), Photo Bagel hosts and tracks daily photo
uploads. Getting started is as easy as emailing a photo to
[photobagel@gmail.com](mailto:photobagel@gmail.com).

## [Who Would Win a Fight?](http://whowouldwininafight.info/)

Ah the age-old question: can Trogdor, the Burninator, defeat DHH, the wearer of
shiny sneakers? [Josh Nichols](http://technicalpickles.com/) and
Jason Lawrence represented Boston when they tried to solve this with their Who
Would Win a Fight app.

Throughout the Rumble Josh pestered the other teams with his video camera,
later posting [the
interviews](http://www.youtube.com/user/technicalpickles) to YouTube. Worth watching.

## [Pockets](http://pocketsapp.com/)

thoughtbot's own Dan Croak and Fred Yates joined [Ben
Orenstein](http://codeulate.com/) and [Joel
Oliveira](http://www.joeloliveira.com/) to deliver Pockets. The idea is
straightforward: voicemail delivered via Twitter. Mixing the Twilio and Twitter
<abbr title="Application Programming Interface">API</abbr>s they allow you to
use an actual phone to leave actual voicemails, receivable by actual Twitter
users. For actual people.

Their [about page](http://pocketsapp.com/pages/about) is pretty great too, if
you ignore all the purple.

Dan explained to me just now (since he sits to my right) that the new <abbr
title="Application Programming Interface">API</abbr>s were the most challenging
part, and the plethora of Twitter Ruby gems didn't help the situation. None were
just the right fit; some had their bugs, others had their limitations. They
ended up modifying the existing gems in-place with the intention of patching
[John Nunemaker's Twitter gem](http://github.com/jnunemaker/twitter/tree/master)
in the future.

## [Slidechop](http://slidechop.com/)

The only pure-thoughtbot team developed Slidechop, an idea we had been kicking
around for a week in the office. It's like this: you have these
[gists](http://gist.github.com/) with slidedown in them (for example,
[training](http://thoughtbot.com/services/training) presentations) and you want
to see the rendered slidedown more easily. So Joe Ferris, Nick Quaranto, and Jon
Yurek built a git-backed presentation application.

They spent Sunday adding sweet features, like multi-screened presentations
(using a master/slave architecture between browsers) and smartphone-driven
slideshows.

Since I sit next to Joe I asked him what the most difficult part was. He told me
the sad story of slide thumbnails, which they never finished. Through some
tricks with the `zoom` <abbr title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</abbr> attribute
they figured out something on Internet Explorer, but no one uses that. They also
looked into many thumbnailing services but none had both a good price and
JavaScript support.  Maybe that will appear in the future.

## [Tanks Bulldozing Dudes](http://tanksbulldozingdudes.com/)

Tanks Bulldozing Dudes is a fun Web game played on a Google Map.

When pressed, Tristan reported that the game was especially challenging to write
because it was filled was unfamiliar technology (including
[Juggernaut](http://juggernaut.rubyforge.org/index.html)). They spent Sunday
trying to handle various Flash mis-configurations that people's computers may
have.

## [Heart On](http://hearton.us/)

Last up is the app my team worked on: Heart On. thoughtbot's Jason Morrison,
Chad Pytel, and myself joined with ex-thoughtbot [Angelo
Simeoni](http://cssboy.com/) to build a Twitter bot for those too shy to talk to
their crush. It can be used fully via Twitter but we also built a Web interface
for it.

To provide a slightly more partial view into the world I asked Jason for his
thoughts on the highs and lows. This caused an argument about whether we ever
got the map working, mixed with the usual slew of innuendo that the name of our
app causes.

## In Conclusion

The Rails Rumble was an amazingly fun time made only more fun by the heavy
population of the thoughtbot office. Be sure to join in next year!