One of our newest SurveyGizmo users, Pauli Price, recently came to us because she wanted to use our survey API for the Rails Rumble 2008 contest that she is involved in.

Pauli gave us a quick run-down interview of the contest as well as how her group is integrating SurveyGizmo into their, hopefully award-winning, project.

It’s always amazing to see what users like you can do with SurveyGizmo, especially the survey API.  Take a look and maybe even enter to be a judge!

*Pauli Price Interview: Rails Rumble Contest*

What is the 2008 Rails Rumble?

The Rails Rumble is a contest where 200 teams, each consisting of 1-4 developers, take up the challenge of building the best web application possible within 48 hours, using the Ruby on Rails web application development framework. As a team, participants choose what they want to build, and then build it. Once the 48 hour build period is up, registered judges try out the completed applications and vote for the ones they feel are best, both overall, and in
each of several categories.

What is your team planning to build?

We’re building an application to manage the coding of verbatim survey responses.

How did you decide on that?

I was involved in planning a startup in the direct response advertising space. It never got off the ground, but in the process, I became very interested in the wonderful world of accountable marketing.

I was planning a market research survey, and wondering how I’d manage the coding of the verbatim portion. As a developer, I had been thinking of building a small application to help me. Just then, I learned that registration for the Rails Rumble had opened.

It struck me that this was a perfect project for the competition: Small enough to be possible to complete over the weekend, and yet large enough to be interesting. I shared the idea with a member of my local Ruby Users Group, Matthew Bergman, and he thought it was an interesting project. He then recruited his friend, Jim Cropcho. So now there are the three of us on the team.

How does SurveyGizmo come into the picture?

When you’re planning an application to manage the coding of survey verbatim responses, you need to get the survey data into the application. Before you can bring the data into the application, you have to define the survey structure. Originally I’d been thinking that we’d have to allow the user to specify the structure of the survey, and then the layout of the data, manually.

But when I looked at SurveyGizmo’s API support, all that changed. I realized that we wouldn’t have to do all that to make this work – and I just about started dancing. This means that we’ll have time to make other aspects of the application better.

SurveyGizmo’s API provides the survey structure in a program readable XML format. Building our application to read a survey structure via an API call is easier than building the ability to manually specify it. Best of all, SurveyGizmo customers won’t have to re-specify their survey structure in our application to be able to use it. And the SurveyGizmo API gives us an easy way to import the response data, too.

Since SurveyGizmo provides a free basic account, Rumble judges will be able to set up accounts, create a survey, enter some survey data, and then test the coding application from end to end. Sweet!

So, what if our readers want to see what you produce?

I’d encourage them to register with the Rumble as a judge. Registration is free, and open to anyone who wants to participate. You can register at RailsRumble.com . *Note- You can register to become a judge at the bottom of the page. The competition runs Oct. 18th – and 19th, with judging to follow. All judges have to register before the 18th.

Tags: API, survey customers