Public voting for the 2009 Rails Rumble competition is now underway. Won't you join us in helping to pick the best of the best from a crop of impressive 48-hour micro applications?

Alright, so this is sort of a shameless plug as I'm a contest organizer, but I can't help it -- I'm a firm believer in the power of applying pressure on the development process to create great stuff! Like diamonds, right? Right. The finalists this year demonstrate that you can accomplish an awful lot of awesome in 48 hours with a talented team, and modern development tools and OSS libraries. It's inspiring to me, to see what they've accomplished, and I hope some of you might feel the same

As long-time readers might remember, I also wrote about the event for DDJ last year. This year we did things a little bit differently, and involved a number of expert panel judges to help whittle down the list of 160 finished applications to a top 22 for the public to vote on (I was fortunate enough to be able to convince DDJ's own EIC Jon Erickson to help with that process too -- thanks Jon!)

Anyway, the results this year are, I think, more impressive than ever before, and I encourage you to check them out and spend a few minutes reviewing them and getting feedback to the entrants. They could use your advice as web-savvy developers, and you, in return, might find some tools that are actually useful in your every-day development practices. This year we have top tier candidates including a lightweight code review tool, a web based interface for creating and managing user stories with Cucumber, and a fantastic web-based cURL variant, as well as many other projects that I would label as developer tools.

Full disclosure: I'm a contest organizer, Jon was an expert panel judge, and DDJ has been kind enough to help sposor the event with some fantastic prizes.