This year, I had the pleasure of competing in RailsRumble and building something that I've been thinking about for quite some time.

I use Dropbox to keep a backup of my favorite photos. Photos that I've curated, and decided I really do not want to lose. In addition, I tended to share the link that Dropbox provides as a means to keep my photos mostly private, while still giving select access to my family, or to friends, or even Twitter followers. I wanted to take this workflow, and make it even better.

Thanks, in large part, to my fantastically skilled teammates – Jason Garber and Minh Tran – we built what I've been dreaming of. And, it looks gorgeous.

We've been able to capture the essence of the workflow – the simplicity – while adding a layer of beauty to bring our curated photos, stored in Dropbox, to the rest of the web in a way that others haven't.

The Tragedy

Our application was going to be called DropPix. Unfortunately, when requesting to have production API access from Dropbox, they have an automated verification that your application's name does not begin with "Drop". Why they don't tell you this on the initial registration for the API is beyond my comprehension.

So, we decided to not break our necks during the Rails Rumble. We had a great start to a codebase and a nearly completed project. We had beautiful design. We felt we did not need to win the competition to be satisfied with the work we had completed. We will definitely keep up the momentum.

What's Next?

We're putting the final touches on PhotoDrop and we'll launch it in short order at PhotoDrop.in. I'm sure Jason, Minh, and I will all tweet up a storm as soon as it goes live.

Thanks for reading! We hope you'll like PhotoDrop!