Hermes: contextual help in 48 hours (Rails Rumble 2013)

Sun, 20 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

🔍

2026 retrospective
The “contextual help” space exploded into a whole product category — Intercom, Pendo, Appcues and others now do this commercially at scale. IFAD’s fork lived on for years inside the agency. The Rails Rumble itself stopped running after 2015, and the era of 48-hour competition hackathons gave way to AI hackathons and startup weekends. The repo is archived but still up.

The Rails Rumble is — was — a 48-hour hackathon where teams of up to four people build a complete web app from scratch using Ruby. No prep work, no pre-written code. Just caffeine, git, and a deadline.

This year our team — @amedeo, @liquid1982, @maisongb, and me — built Hermes: the epic messenger service, entry #385.

"Guess The Friend" — 48 hours of Rails Rumble madness

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

🔍

2026 retrospective
This game used the Facebook Graph API to access your friends list, profile photos, and personal details — name, location, interests, the works. These are exactly the same APIs that Cambridge Analytica exploited in 2018 to harvest data from 87 million Facebook users for political profiling. We built a fun party game; they built a surveillance machine. Facebook shut down these APIs in 2018 after the scandal broke. The game hasn’t worked since. The irony is thick — the same platform features that made silly social games possible also enabled one of the biggest privacy scandals in tech history.

Last weekend we competed in Rails Rumble 2012 — 48 hours to build a web app from scratch using Ruby on Rails, no preparation allowed. Our team was part of the Italian 48rails community, and we built Guess The Friend: a Facebook game that implements the classic Guess Who? board game, but using your real Facebook friends as characters.

Hackathon on Marcello Barnaba

Hermes: contextual help in 48 hours (Rails Rumble 2013)

"Guess The Friend" — 48 hours of Rails Rumble madness