SimpliTex - Ruby on Rails Web Solutions and Consulting

For our entry in last weekend’s Rails Rumble, I partnered with Justin Britten of Compulsivo to create Cockpit.

We were tired of constantly logging in to various sites to see key data for the various projects we were working on. While RSS feeds can provide much of the data, digging through RSS feeds doesn’t provide you with a true executive level overview of your project. You really want to see only the most important, relevant, and timely data… and ideally act on it. Cockpit is our answer to this most annoying problem.

In the 48 hours we had for the competition we decided to focus on getting a simple proof of concept view of key data from just four widely used web services. Lots of other sites provide similarly useful data, and full interactivity would be great, but the clock was a tickin’, so we limited our scope to the following:

• Basecamp messages, todos and milestones - your everyday project management stuff
• github commits - additions to source code, which one can only hope means work is getting done
• Lighhouse tickets - when said additions go wrong they generally end up as support tickets
• Hoptoad exceptions - when additions go really wrong they end up as exceptions, as in hopefully very rare

Below is our delirium induced Cockpit introduction video… (made right after the competition ended, in other words on virtually no sleep). It is quite funny if you know us, and hopefully at least somewhat if you don’t.

We have high hopes that with the feedback that comes via the competition we will be able to create an application to help rescue all of us from project overload. Of course, winning would be great too, so don’t forget to vote for us!

The competition was a blast, even if tiring. A great big thank you goes out to all the organizers, volunteers, and sponsors.

Tags: programming, rails, railsrumble