the contest
Posted by jcarroll
Nov 13
So here at thoughtbot we’re really proud of the two company founders, Chad and Jon , for finishing up their first book: Pro Active Record: Databases with Ruby and Rails. To celebrate the publication of the book, we’re going to have a contest where we’ll be giving away some copies of the book, and maybe we’ll throw in some other sweet thoughtbot swag.
Master of your domain model
We think that a lot of you are like us – you have ideals about how you want to do software development – but you live in “the real world” and sometimes a request comes in that’s a little too zany for even your limber agile mind to fathom. Maybe it’s a request from one of your consulting firm’s clients; maybe it’s a request for an internal application at your company; maybe it’s an RFP document you received.
We want you to email us your most ridiculous or bizarre client request — and tell us how it turned out. Did you implement it exactly to the specification even though it was absurd? Did you get them to compromise? Did you leave your job?
Now, since we all kind of know each other, I’m sure that we’ll all feel comfortable within the confines of the honor system. To protect the innocent (or not so innocent), please anonymize your clients names (internal project teams, your boss, whoever) in your submission.
Here are a few example entries…
- Request ~ Allow users to import their entire iPhoto library and then do facial recognition to compare their photos to their facebook friends via the facebook api; Result ~ convinced them that their windows servers would not support jpegs produced from iPhoto.
- Request ~ Tags must be taggable; Result ~ We passed the project to a college kid using PHP.
Send email to contest@thoughtbot.com with your entry. We’ll post the winners right here on GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS.
Prizes
The top 3 most ridiculous stories will be chosen by us and will receive a limited edition copy of Pro Active Record signed by Chad Pytel and Jon Yurek.
Comments on this post
Nov 13
Sean said,
Can we enter more than once? I have several stories that would fit the bill.
Nov 13
matt jankowski said,
No problem – send them all. You won’t win 10x but you can enter 10x.
Nov 13
Joe Grossberg said,
Tags must be taggable.
And are the tags used to tag tags that tag non-tags, themselves, taggable?
Nov 14
Alac Matthew said,
We are a truly global product development firm that partners with software product companies ranging from start-ups to established ISVs to provide software product life cycle solutions. We have worked with more than 50 software product companies in various domains like Education, Healthcare, Retail and Finance. Our wide-ranging experience has enabled us to build a strong product environment within the company that remains unmatched in the industry.
Nov 14
Peter Cooper said,
Alac: They sound good! I’d definitely choose their wide-ranging experience to develop my miscellaneous products in various domains.
Nov 16
Luke Gedeon said,
Now, hold on a second! Tagging tags is not a half bad idea. It gives you a flexible self-defined hierarchy. The perfect balance between structure and adaptability. And it is not even difficult in Rails since every tag has its own URL.
Nov 16
Stephen said,
When will the contest be over?
Nov 16
theJareCare said,
The contest ends on Nov. 30.
oh yeah!
Nov 22
oldmoe said,
Tagging tags? say hello to the implemented but never finished acts_as_taggable_tag it is basically a free form relation ship (polymorphic from both sides) so any model can act as a tag for any other model and at the same time it can be tagged by any other model
Nov 27
Matt Powell said,
My old job encompassed a wide range of incredibly generic web design projects, for which our project managers literally copied and pasted entire specification documents because they were technologically illiterate. Some of my favourite requests:
Request: I was working on two basically identical sites for two rival companies at roughly the same time. One had twice the budget, though, so the word came down from on high to “just make it twice as good”. Result: Split the time in half and fudged the numbers in time reporting.
Request: A client liked the look of an image we had used in the headers of about 75% of the pages on our own website. So they asked if they could use it. When we objected on the grounds that that image was basically a key element of our branding, they reminded us that we were a design company and we’d have no problem finding another image to use on our website. Result: We found another image to use on our website.
Request: “What do you mean, you haven’t finished our custom CMS software yet? You’ve been working on it all week!” Result: I quit my job.
Dec 01
Stephen said,
OmG WhErEz tEh wInnArz?
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