Justin Britten

Pilot your Project with Cockpit

This past weekend we competed in RailsRumble 2008 – a 48-hour Ruby on Rails programming competition where the goal is to produce a complete application in a weekend.  We partnered with Marcus Mateus of SimpliTex 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
• Github source code commits
• Lighhouse bug tickets
• Hoptoad exceptions

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. Over the next 10 days, anyone can vote for Cockpit.  So far we’re off to a great start.  As of the first day we’re ranked #10 of 131 in the Usefulness category — in our opinion the only category that truly matters in the long run.

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

Note: Most of this article was authored by Marcus Mateus and was originally posted to the SimpliTex blog.