Rails Rumble after thoughts

Building an application in 48 hrs is hard. Time flies when you are not prepared.

Here are some of the things that you want to touch on before the competition starts.

• application security / access - who has access to what
• model / resource routes - what models are required and how are they connected from browser / UI perspective
• fields & columns in models
• model validation / mandatory fields

For the initial first few models that you add to the application, the effort to add each one does not increases in linear fashion.

Because with each model, you need CRUD pages / functionality. Each additional page needs to be styled therefore more visual design required, also more thoughts required for workflow / navigation design.

Often we have to just implement some crude pages to test / visualise our app (particular for workflow) while our designer work thru the markup, which means we usually have to go back and cleanup those pages' markup to fit with the design.

Overall, it was exhausting but I learnt heaps of cool tricks this year building TechMeets.com.