I have to say that I was really surprised with the prizes described at http://blog.railsrumble.com/2012/10/13/prizes-prizes-prizes/ . It seems modest given the sheer scale of the event (500 teams) and the size of some of the sponsors. Our local start-up weekend awarded $20,000 in cash between the top three winners, in addition to a lot of free services, and the competition wouldn't be nearly as stiff.
It seems modest given the sheer scale of the event (500 teams) and the size of some of the sponsors.
I think a couple of things come into play. It was far from guaranteed that 500 teams would actually sign up. The Rails Rumble didn't take place in 2011 and was fresh back this year. Also, I'd make a guess that having more sponsors reduces their interest in putting up more than they have to. If it were just a few, they'd get more out of it so might put up more goodies. Collectively, though, I think the prizes are pretty good.
(Disclaimer: I'm partly involved with the Rumble but am not involved with sponsorships at all and know no details.)
I think the prizes are actually pretty good considering the zero cost of entry. A local startup weekend I participated in had prizes that were far less than what was on offer for Rails Rumble 2012.
I was very impressed by that background animation for the first 10 seconds and then I got really dizzy. I think they should stop the animation a few sec after.
I really like the animation too. But I'm wondering why they chose to make a collage of movie posters if the search is for tv shows. Awesome nonetheless.
One of the most interesting things to me about this is the listing of gems/plugins and APIs used for each entry. If it's all in a structured form, it'd be interesting to see a table/list of the most used.
In terms of API, just browsing through, I saw that the Solo winner (http://medpass.es) used a government drug pill identification API I'd never heard of before:
We used Slim for findthin.gs—it's faster, has much better whitespace control, and, imho, better achieves Haml's reduce noise, increase beauty aims. But there's no contest about Sass and CoffeeScript being amazing.
UI issue: I found the descriptions hard to read. Too many things thrown at me, and the thing I want to see, the description, is in a small font and low contrast color.
After seeing the amazing entries that did win, we are humbled and inspired to try harder next time around. (And next time, we will absolutely hunt down a great designer)
Your design is veeeeery attractive. In fact, it was the one that stood out the most to me when I first looked through the entries.
I'd love to "borrow" your mediocre designer
I have to say that I was really surprised with the prizes described at http://blog.railsrumble.com/2012/10/13/prizes-prizes-prizes/ . It seems modest given the sheer scale of the event (500 teams) and the size of some of the sponsors. Our local start-up weekend awarded $20,000 in cash between the top three winners, in addition to a lot of free services, and the competition wouldn't be nearly as stiff.