Splendid Bacon

October 21, 2010

Last weekend we participated in the Rails Rumble, a 48 hour coding contest. The web application that we built is Splendid Bacon.

Splendid Bacon offers project management that doesn’t hurt. The tag line might say that it’s “Project Management for Hackers”, but rest assured that it is as simple as eating bacon, so you don’t need to be a wizard to use it.

How it was built

With espressos (49 of them over the weekend), steaks (large ones), lots of bacon (8 packets in total), Ardbeg Uigeadail (half a bottle), and a bottle of champagne (for celebration on first deploy).

We’d been talking about building a project dashboard for internal use at Kisko Labs for a while, so this was really born out of what we wanted and needed for ourselves.

We had a couple of short, half-hour planning sessions a couple of days before the start of the Rumble and our designer (Karri Saarinen) did some sketches in his notebook in the week prior to the Rumble. For more on Karri’s design process, you can check out his slides from a recent lecture on the subject. During the planning sessions we also divided up the major tasks among the team members.

The app backend and most of the functionality was mostly ready be Saturday evening, so while the rest of us left to go catch some well-earned sleep, Karri stayed behind for a further 3 hours to implement the project dashboard and some other views.

Most of Sunday was spent polishing up all the views and the user experience and the homepage was the last view to be completed. The first deployment went live at about 10 or 11pm and then we spent some time ironing out the worst bugs.

First deploy

The response

We were taken aback by the positive response we got from the Twittersphere, Hacker News, and the rest of the interwebs and we broke the 10k unique visitors barrier about 18h after the Rumble closed.

Over all since the competition closed we’ve gotten over 14,000 unique visitors, 95,000 page views, and some 9000 demo users.

Splendid Bacon has also been featured or mentioned on ReadWriteWeb, Great Web Apps, the Forrst Podcast, and in many other blog posts.

The Final Round

Unfortunately Splendid Bacon didn’t make it into the final 24 (apparently bacon isn’t quite as popular as we were led to believe). If you like Splendid Bacon the best way for you to show your support is to simply use it. Feedback or feature suggestions are also highly welcome. Feel free to contact us at contact@splendidbacon.com.

Good luck to all the finalists, please go vote for them here.

Yummy bacon