The Django Dash for 2012 is now over, and once again it was a ton of fun! The Dash is a 48 hour coding competition for teams of up to three, competing to see who can build the best Django application over a weekend. To top it off, all of the entries are made available as open source.
This year I went solo for the first time, which made it quite gruelling as I had to handle everything from back-end code, interface development, and visual design. I decided to follow the same recipe as our 3rd place entry from last year, Drawn By, specifically by creating an environment where people can come together and interact in real-time using WebSockets. I named my entry GAMBLOR — it’s an online casino where people can move around and chat with each other, while playing casino games with fake money. Check out GAMBLOR as well as the source code if you’re interested, and you can see the game plugin system I built to power the initial games implemented: roulette and craps.
Apart from the staples of Django and jQuery, here are some of the components I used that made GAMBLOR possible in such a short amount of time:
I’ve put together a table below that lists all of the final entries, with links to their sites and source code. I left out any entries that didn’t contain a working site, or didn’t seem to function. If I’ve missed any or you have any other corrections, please let me know.
It’s interesting to look at some of the recurring themes present within all of the entries. There were multiple entries that fell under each of the following ideas:
My definite favourites are Heroes of Git & Hub, which lets you battle your open source projects against others in a D&D style game, and The Busitizer which I’ll just leave for you to check out for yourself.
| Title | Description | Team Size | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| API Tester | Automated tests for APIs | 3 | Site | Source |
| Badger | Get badges for open source | 3 | Site | Source |
| Black Hole | Mail web-app | 3 | Site | Source |
| Cloud Fish | Cloud server manager | 3 | Site | Source |
| Comminator | Hacker News clone | 1 | Site | Source |
| Crowd Photo | Crowd sourcing photos | 2 | Site | Source |
| Django Gallery | App store for photos | 1 | Site | Source |
| Django Tutorial | Interactive Django tutorial | 3 | Site | Source |
| Folio Bag | Portfolio generator | 1 | Site | Source |
| Folivora | Dependency manager | 3 | Site | Source |
| GAMBLOR | Real-time multi-user casino | 1 | Site | Source |
| Gif Feed | Collection of Gifs | 1 | Site | Source |
| Green Room | Dressing room opinion app | 3 | Site | Source |
| Gungnir | Cloud server manager | 3 | Site | Source |
| Heroes of Git & Hub | Battles of GitHub projects | 2 | Site | Source |
| Ipse Dixit | Collection of quotes | 3 | Site | Source |
| Kirchenreich | Maps mashup for churches | 3 | Site | Source |
| Lemidora | Photo sharing | 3 | Site | Source |
| Lictor | Stack trace visualizer | 3 | Site | Source |
| Like I'm 5ive | Dictionary / wiki tool | 3 | Site | Source |
| Miracles Live | Instagram/Flickr mashup of world wonders | 3 | Site | Source |
| Mosaic | Open source project portfolio generator | 2 | Site | Source |
| Old Mail | Group email collboration | 3 | Site | Source |
| Pelican Migrator | Migrate blogs to Pelican | 3 | Site | Source |
| Project Starter | Landing page generator | 2 | Site | Source |
| Promisely | Collection of promises | 3 | Site | Source |
| Publican | Business ledger app | 1 | Site | Source |
| Quester | Create quest games on a world map | 3 | Site | Source |
| Red Check | Spell checker for websites | 3 | Site | Source |
| Slug.in | Custom URL shortener | 3 | Site | Source |
| Tamli | Social bookmarking | 1 | Site | Source |
| The Busitizer | Add Gary Busey to Facebook photos | 3 | Site | Source |
| The Hack Box | Hackathon manager | 3 | Site | Source |
| Try Box | Online IDE for programming tutorials | 3 | Site | Source |
| Try Try | Interactive programming tutorials | 2 | Site | Source |
| Tutor Us | Create & run online classes | 3 | Site | Source |
| Wikipedia Analytics | Create charts from Wikipedia data | 2 | Site | Source |