The programming contest went well. We didn’t win. We didn’t even get close, really. It won’t be totally wrong to compare us to the Jamaican bobsled team; we came to give it a shot.

Still, it was pretty fun. If another contest comes up with more familiar technologies, I’d be keen to have another go.

On another note, in January I wrote about a guy who killed his wife and unborn baby and got a 3 year sentence. Today I learned his sentence has been extended to 5 years. No, I’m not fascinated with that case or anything, just came across the headline and remembered writing about it in the past

In a nutshell, teams of up to 3 people sign up to take part. At 12:00 noon on Saturday we are given a general theme and have 24 hours to complete a web application that is somehow tied to this theme. The weapons of choice are either Ruby on Rails or Java compiled with the Google Web Toolkit. We’re not touching Java.

This is my first programming competition and should prove to be pretty fun. I’ve teamed up with two co-workers to go head-to-head with the other 72 teams. Neither of us has any experience with Ruby on Rails (or Ajax) beyond poking at it out of curiosity months ago, though we’ve played with it in recent weeks to get up to speed.

Keeping with the nerdy theme, I will (try to) stop sending email notifications to everyone when I write about computers and other geeky stuff like that. If you’re still interested, subscribe to the RSS feed