It's really interesting to see what went into this before the competition. I'm on one of the other teams that'd doing pretty well in the voting (we built Drawbr

It's really interesting to see what went into this before the competition. I'm on one of the other teams that'd doing pretty well in the voting (we built Drawbridge: http://team-hyphen.no.de/ http://team-hyphen.no.de/), so it's especially interesting for me to see what other teams did. Much as I'd love to win, Drawbridge isn't near the level of polish that Scrabb.ly and a few of the other top apps are, and I think a lack of preparation is the main culprit. We had a general idea of what we were going to build and how it was going to be designed, but we had to scramble several times to redesign and rearchitect essential components. (We did our server-side API design without accounting for the fact that we were going to be using websockets, completely overlooked the fact that we'd have to come up with an API for our DAO or anything on the client side, had to completely redo how variations and their UI worked, and had to come up with a homepage design all within the span of the competition.) Still, it's been an incredibly fun ride. In the absolute worst case I built a tool I've been wanting for a long time but haven't been able to find the time to build. In the best case, other people find it useful too--having other people liking and using things I've built is one of my biggest motivators. I've also learned a ton about making a successful app for one of these competitions. If I could do it again there are a lot of things I'd do differently. (Luckily, Rails Rumble is coming up, so I can!) I've been meaning to write up summary of what went right and what went wrong for us, and how we could improve. Would anyone else be interested if I turned it into a blog post?