After three weeks of development from scratch and four weeks of tuning and debugging, the team of Rubyists I have been working with for the last two months finally launched our last project. At 8:30 a.m. EST on Thursday, April 11, 2007, the Williams UK Formula 1 team’s new website went live!
Full credit where credit is due:
Endemol UK was contracted by Williams F1 to develop the site. After some months of dicking around, Endemol subcontracted Futurecorp to finish the job. Futurecorp is the UK virtual IT shop that hired me and other developers on an hourly basis for this project. We rewrote the full app in seven weeks and went live with it.
Not to be picky, but I wanted to make sure that the above was not left unsaid. 
During the last seven weeks, we developed a complete content management system for Williams F1 news reports, event calendar, podcast and video content delivery, and Flash content management. The news, audio, video and event calendar is displayed in a user-friendly manner in a xhtml-strict compliant web front end for sports journalist access. The CMS also produces and manages content for a Flash front end for use by us common folk.
It has been a crazy time, especially the first three 65-plus-hour weeks of horror. I am particularly proud of those three weeks, because we had a fully functional application finished by that time. Rails really is that productive, folks. This was not a small application by any means.
The last four weeks have been more tame, with interminable boring hours of online chit chat BS sessions in Campfire, as developers waited and waited for QA to finish testing and maybe find a few lowly bugs for us developers to squash. The bug count was really low and we developers went home hungry some days. 😉
Congratulations to all of the people below. I will miss working with all of you, it’s been a great time.
Ruby on Rails Team
Team Lead: Nick Wright, Colorado, USA
Kyle Drake, Minnesota, USA
Mark Selby, UK
Dougal Shearer, Scotland
Steven Holloway, Australia
Yury Kotlyarov, Russia
Brad Bollenbach, Montreal, Canada
and myself, Puerto Rico, USA territory
—
HTML Team
Team Lead: Dan Whitmarsh, Sweden
Gary Robinson, UK & Ben Miller, UK
—
Flash Team
Team Lead: Matt Folkard, UK
Tim Cooper, UK & Julian Wilson, L.A., California, USA
—
Support & Infrastructure Team
Team Lead: Jason Griffiths, UK
—
Project Leads:
Michael Christenson, Ohio, USA
Williams Project Lead, Futurecorp UK Ltd
Shaun Laughey, UK
Director of Operations, Futurecorp UK Ltd
—
Management:
Max Haggenmiller, UK
General Manager, Futurecorp UK Ltd
Radha Stirling, UK
Head of Development, Futurecorp UK Ltd
Justin Fanning, UK
Senior Manager, Futurecorp UK Ltd
Eddie Bosticco, UK
Senior Manager, Futurecorp UK Ltd
Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, software.development
Wow-some nice engineering went into that one. Beautiful site. Think it’s got some legs.
I’m late to the party as usual, but I wanted to visit the site before commenting. Man, it’s where art meets code. Not clumpy, bumpy, and slow like a lot of racin’ sites.
Good job, PJ. And the rest of the team as well.
-k-
Woot! You aren’t kidding about the productivity because I’m sure we wrote the core of the CMS in 3 days. Well I say we I think it was Nick and Steven and Michael and you and okay … I just do the ASCII art.
Big hi! to your ninja aunts.
Thanks for the blog entry & credit PJ! It was a pleasure working with you sir.
Congrats to the whole Futurecorp team on getting this site live, the final result looks amazing.
Cheers,
-Julian