A proud day for Koprol. Our very own Rafeequl Rahman aka. vcool won the $20,000 grand prize at the first YMDA in Indonesia, yesterday (May 16th, 2009) at Plaza Senayan.

YMDA is Yahoo!'s effort to promote their mobile application platform. They invited developers to compete in 5 categories by building a Yahoo! mobile application for 5 award sponsors. Winner of each category gets $10,000. Then the judges select one of those 5 winners as 'Best in Show' to receive another $10,000. Rafeequl, who entered alone, won the whole thing over teams of Indonesia's best developers.

The application Rafeeq developed, called Lapangan Hijau, allows people to follow the national soccer league from their mobile phones. It provides schedule, live scores, even SMS reminders and account connection to Facebook.

By his own admission, Rafeeq did not expect to be named as winner at all. He came to the final event just to meet other contestants and to see who would win. He didn't know how he won, but based on what an insider told him, the judges saw the 'passion' in his craft. And yes, Rafeeq did design Lapangan Hijau based on his own needs as an avid soccer fan.

Rafeeq credited his experience working at SkyEight and developing Koprol to be very helpful. He got familiar with Ruby on Rails, JavaScript frameworks, and plugins while developing Koprol. In fact, he built Lapangan Hijau with Ruby on Rails. He also thanks all his Koprol friends for inspiring and supporting him. From us here at Koprol, we can testify that Rafeeq is a very humble genius and we couldn't be prouder. Go vcool!

Related news:

• VIVAnews: 'Lapangan Hijau' Juarai YMDA
• VIVAnews: Ingin Hajikan Orang Tua Setelah Juara YMDA