Rails Rumble 2010: GitWrite
Posted 23 October 2010 under design, railsrumble, ruby
Last weekend, I participated in the Rails Rumble for the third year in a row with fellow Vigeteers Matt Henry, Chris Jones, and Clinton Nixon. Our app, GitWrite, is billed as “blogging for nerds, done right.” It’s a pretty neat concept — sign up with your GitHub account and give us your public key, and we create blog backed by a repository that you can push to in order to make updates.
Unlike past Rumbles, where I’ve spent the weekend heads down in TextMate, I wrote very little code this time around, instead handling the team’s design duties. I really enjoyed working a different part of my brain, though it was frustrating that all the keyboard shortcuts I used to rely on are long gone from my memory. To my surprise, the design has received high marks from a bunch of the judges, which is flattering to say the least.
GitWrite did really well in the expert judging phase, receiving a perfect score from one of our judges. It entered open judging in third place, though it’s since fallen to around fifteenth. We were targeting a certain type of user with this app, and the comments reflect this: for every “this is nerdy and awesome,” there’s a “stupid” (no really, that’s the full text of one comment).
I’m not sure what the future of GitWrite is — the concept seems to have legs, but we’ll need to go back and reengineer a few things if we want to build a lasting product. In any event, I had a great time working with the guys and I’m super proud of what we were able to accomplish. If nothing else, it’s always nice to get written up in TechCrunch.