Divshot at the Rails Rumble

This past weekend, team Divshot participated in (and sponsored) the Rails Rumble building Revision.io. We love hackathons and I wanted to demonstrate how Divshot can be used in a real world situation, so I screencasted myself using it throughout the competition. We ended up taking 2nd place out of 500 teams (which is very exciting for me, this was my fourth Rails Rumble!). Competing in hackathons is a way of eating our own dog food, of stepping back from building Divshot and have some time to just use it instead.

In this case, I was doing the back end work and roughing out the front end and Jake was doing the detail work and polish (which are super important in a hackathon, by the way). I used Divshot to quickly build out enough of an interface that I could copy and paste the output into my text editor and wire it up to data. You can see in the video that many of the Revision.io interfaces turned out to be pretty close to their Divshot prototypes, while a couple evolved quite a bit after they were taken into a text editor.

Divshot has come to be something that lives right next to my text editor. We've worked hard to make it easy to get useful, production-quality HTML out of Divshot and that means that I can just drop in, build something (whether it's a full page interface or just a piece like a form), and drop back out again. Of course we still have a lot of work to do, but I was happy to find that I really enjoyed using Divshot this weekend and it helped me to get more done faster, which is exactly the point!