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!

Update: we’re going to polish this one for another couple days — check back for updates!

We’ll post photos in this Flickr set and we’ll try to tweet a bit now and then as well.  Check back here to see what we come up with.

As Rails Rumble (and Node Knockout) veterans, we knew that there’s basically no such thing as too simple a product for these competitions — no matter how little you think you have to do, you’re always sweating bullets with half an hour left to go. With that in mind, we kept I Dig Durham as simple as possible, leaving us plenty of time to really polish the site.

Though basically feature complete, we’ve got a few tweaks we plan to make to the site, and we’d like to expand the underlying app to support I Dig sites for more of our favorite cities.

(1) the core of any software project team is a software developer.  Without a developer, you won’t get much software development done.  (2) Having an awesome designer on hand is great for results and team morale.  (3). Having a disproportionate number of people who can neither design nor code will result in a lot of time spent on product naming.

We also linked to our set of photos. Enjoy!

1. I Dig Durham
2. Lunnnch
3. Tofu Engine

We’ll share more about the weekend and these projects in the coming weeks both here at on the Viget blog.  Thanks for keeping up with our Pointless endeavors!

1. We made some updates yesterday to get it working again, which happily included some moderate speed improvements.
2. We’re planning for some additional enhancements to HeyCraig that we think you’ll like.  The schedule for release is … undermined at present.

Thanks for using HeyCraig and our other pointless stuff.

I just got a peek at the new design for this site and it is sweet. We’ll be building it out over the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for an all new pointlesscorp.com launching soon.

We’re also cooking up some new Pointless Projects to share with everyone, so look for 2011 to be a lot more Pointless, if you know what I mean.

Breaking news! We have removed the invitation system from Connect-A-Sketch. The application — in all its alpha glory — is now open to the public! Here are three key points to keep in mind:

1. While C-A-S is dear to us and we think it’s a valuable tool, we want to be very clear that at this point, it is not guaranteed to be fully operational and bug-free all the time.  You have been warned!
2. New features have been added, including the ability to share your project with others. When you share with a friend, she will receive an email with a URL to your project. She will be able to click through (but not edit) your project.
3. The future of C-A-S is promising and bright. Seriously, we see a ton of potential with this app. But you can help shape how the future unfolds by using C-A-S and sharing your feedback and feature requests.

If you’re new to the application, you might want to read our first post about it. If you’re new to Pointless Corp, here’s a little history. If you want to know who is behind all this genius, the answer rhymes with “dig it.”

Happy sketching!