rails day, the aftermath

Rails Day is done. I worked from about 5am through to about 1.45am. So I could have had a couple more hours ;-) But I was pretty sleepy by then.

Here are a few unsorted thoughts about what I learned.

• I was a bit thrown off when it came to writing user authentication, since I've used User Engine for my existing projects, and Engines were not allowed for this competition. So I used Acts as Authenticated instead, but it took a bit of learning, and there was an awkward bug that turned out to be caused by a hardcoded controller name in the templates (I think!).
• I am pleased with the core function of my application: entering a shopping list quickly. It's the most heavily "Web 2.0/AJAX" application that I've written, with auto-completion and a dynamically updating page.
• I had to learn how to use the autocomplete text field in Rails, but Amy Hoy's article was very helpful. I was more confused when I tried putting in autocomplete for the tag entry fields - there were lots of extra requests going on. I decided this was probably due to there being lots of the same field appearing in the window (although most of them are hidden at any time), so I hacked out the javascript into a single place rather than using the Rails generated script, and it seemed to work.
• But there's still a bug in trying to update tags in Internet Explorer: I couldn't figure out what was wrong, since it works fine in Firefox, and I didn't notice the problem until it was late and I was falling asleep. I hope that doesn't ruin my chances too much.
• The time seemed to pass very quickly! I had RSI Breakreminder running, and between about 9pm and when I finished, hardly any time seemed to pass between the reminders.
• I was disappointed that I didn't manage to implement some of the functions that I had planned, but at the same time I was glad that I'd done a design where I could add on functions as I had time, rather than having to get a huge thing finished. I wonder if I should have picked my 'recipes' and 'meal planning' rather than 'store sorting', but I think I've done the more interesting bits.
• I had to do some swift redesign of the Store sorting functionality from what I had designed on paper. I realised that not only was it complicated for me to implement, it would be too complicated for users to understand. I scaled it back to a simpler model which won't produce perfect results but which is usable.
• The actual 'sort List by Store' function is horribly inefficient. I had hoped to reduce it to a single SQL call, but I couldn't figure out all the joins involved (7 tables are used). On the other hand it isn't called very often, so it might not matter.
• theora helped me put some effort into the styling and layout, which I don't tend to do that much usually.
• I did wish I'd found an artist/designer for my team though. I spent a while trying to draw the cartoon pig I could see in my mind, but it didn't come out very well.
• When trying to sort out colors, I found that the visual_effect :highlight command didn't seem to quote color codes properly when used from RJS. I had to double quote the color code, e.g. "'#CCFF99'".
• I am tired and my arms/wrists ache.

That'll do. If you're interested I have updated my deployed version of the application at http://happypig.ethelred.org/ to my final version of the day.