Last year a bunch of us went to the Savor Craft Beer event in DC (http://www.savorcraftbeer.com). If you’ve never been, its a must have trip at least once in your life if you consider yourself a beer lover. One of the challenges we had last year was their website isn’t built for a mobile application and when you have 150+ beers to pick from it’s helpful to have a guide in your pocket. We also thought it would be really great to have a quick way to find any new types of beers that we hadn’t had before or you heard about a great tasting beer from a guy in the crowd but needed a fast way to find it.
So this year we scratched our own itch and built Savor beers. It was a really handy pocket guide to the event and let us find everything we needed quickly. It was great walking around the crowd and seeing people use our first mobile app. I can’t say we will be doing more mobile stuff in the future, but it was definitely fun for us to build and we look forward to expanding to the capabilities for next year’s event. We used the jQuery Mobile framework and a couple rails gems, wrote some screen scraping utilities, bundled it all together and hosted it on Heroku. Lots of new technologies learned and deployed in a very short about of time. Not bad for something we built in our 20% time.