RailsQuest
I spent last weekend at Railscamp, an unconference/hackathon for developers. One project I worked on while there is RailsQuest. It started on friday night when a group of us started brainstorming ideas for a project that we could build at Railscamp, for Railscamp.
The concept was to take something that happened at Railscamp (people programming stuff for fun) and add a unifying social game mechanic on top. So, avoiding the implementation details, people create challenges such as a maze game, or a quiz and these ‘Quests’ are aggregated by Railsquest. Then you can complete other peoples challenges and earn their badge by doing so.
This works because we just added a little bit of structure to what people were already doing, the guy who was already building a game just needed to integrate with the Railsquest api, and those who couldn’t think of something to program could now build a ‘Quest’ for Railsquest.
For me, Railsquest was an interesting exercise from a product development point of view. From the very start, it was a collaborative effort, our entire potential userbase was in the same room as us, so we talked to people.
If our discussions on how it should work got stuck or we had any doubts we could just lean over to the next table and check. “Would you use this? Would you build a quest? Can you start now? Here’s some paper, write down the api you want.” Combined with enough fexibility and humility to completely pivot the product, this approach makes it hard not to build something people want.
We had to work fast, and build the absolute minimum product required, we started brainstorming after dinner on Friday night, say 8pm. Because Railsquest was designed to be used at Railscamp, it needed to be fully functional well before the end of Railscamp so that people could use it. We set a goal of having a working app by Saturday morning, and worked till 4am to achieve this.
On Saturday morning we added encryption and verification so that badges couldn’t be faked, and built some quests. Then we presented Railsquest to a bunch of other Railscampers, and people started using it. Mission Accomplished. I spent the rest of the weekend recovering.
Now Railscamp is over and I’ll probably never look at Railsquest again, but the concept of encouraging peoples independent projects with a social, game-like environment that encourages people to show off remains. And it’s something that could work really well in the formal education system, I look forward to working on it.
