New Pointless Project: OfficeGames

This post originally appeared on Pointless Corp.

We’re a competitive company, so for this year’s Pointless Weekend, the team in Viget’s Durham office thought it’d be cool to put together a simple app for keeping track of competitions around the office. 48 hours later (give or take), we launched OfficeGames. We’re proud of this product, and plan to continue improving it in the coming weeks. Some of the highlights for me:

Everyone Doing Everything

We’re a highly collaborative company, but by and large, when it comes to client work, everyone on the team has a fairly narrow role. Zachary writes Ruby code. Todd does UX. Jeremy focuses on the front end. Not so for Pointless weekend – UX, design, and development duties were spread out across the entire team. Everyone had the repo checked out and was committing code.

Responsive Design with Bootstrap

We used Twitter’s Bootstrap framework to build our app. The result is a responsive design that shines on the iPhone but holds up well on larger screens. I was impressed with how quickly we were able to get a decent-looking site together, and how well the framework held up once Jeremy and Doug started implementing some of Mark’s design ideas.

Rails as a Mature Framework

I was impressed with the way everything came together on the backend. It seems to me that we’re finally realizing the promise of the Rails framework: common libraries that handle the application plumbing, while still being fully customizable, so developers can quickly knock out the boilerplate and then focus on the unique aspects of their applications. We used SimplestAuth, InheritedResources, and SimpleForm to great effect.

Sign your office up for OfficeGames and then add your coworkers to start tracking scores. Let us know what you think!