"Why do I do these things to myself ?" is a question that came to mind this weekend, during the Rails Rumble. The principle of the weekend is simple: you develop an app in 48 hours, from midnight GMT on friday to midnight GMT on sunday.

Hendrik, Yoni and I came together at the office i share to have a go (Tom helped us for a few hours). Hendrik did the front-end integration, Yoni the design and CSS, Tom is a Rails developer. We'd brainstormed beforehand and came up with a nice and simple concept: Same Same, an application that allows you to create before-after stories with pictures. Loads of potential for storytelling (before-after haircut, after 1 beer, 2 beers, 3 beers, before-after food fight, the stages of pregnancy) .

Well, it took caffeine, chocolate, pizza, blood, sweat and tears, but we made it, goddammit.

Lessons learned:

• I do my best refactoring in my sleep, or in the shower. None of which were available in any great quantities during the weekend

• Simple is better: in this case, adding more functionality made the application more difficult to understand. We probably should throw out the voting mechanism, and add a big and obvious 'next' button.

• Lots of little technical things, like Rails templates I hadn't used before, jQuery live validation, uploadify, ...

What I'd do differently, if i did it again:

• more than 1 (full-time) developer is necessary. You need a pair, or at least someone to do sanity checks - by hour 25 you're starting to lose your edge.

• Tests: i threw out testing thinking I'd gain time, but I didn't - test sets immediately show breakages, and these occur even in the most sane situations, which this wasn't.

• sleep more, like 6 hours in the middle - i slept 3. What you lose in time, you gain in focus. When i woke up on monday, i knew how to solve the app's most obvious bugs in about 3 code lines ... frustrating :) No patching is allowed after the 48 hours ...

I liked working with Hendrik and Yoni, and I think we made a good team, overall. We should have recorded our conversations from hour 45, it got fairly surreal. It was a good experience, one that, I think, made me a better developer. I'm intending to pick up Same Same later, rework it a little bit and put it online in a proper manner.