John Sturgeon

John Sturgeon

Retired software engineer, contributor to open source projects when I can. Working on way too many projects and hobbies, and making notes here along the way.

Making The Great Football Pool a Turnkey Product

1 minute read

Summary

I have been running a simple online “Pick ‘em” style football pool for decades – since 1995 – and it’s been a source of enjoyment for my friends and family every year. I thought it would be fun to make the project a ‘white box’ or ‘turnkey’ solution for other people who want to run their own friends and family football pool.

Quick technical overview

It started out as CGI scripts and html forms where the data was saved in csv flat files. Over the years, I’ve migrated the technology from CGI to PHP to Ruby on Rails and finally to Flask / MongoDB.

The scores / odds / etc.. are fed via an undocumented API from ESPN.

All my code is open-sourced and available on GitHub

Authentication is done through Discord oath2.

I use Listmonk for my email distribution list.

I use Prefect to host my ‘secrets’ and automate the workers.

Everything is in Docker containers and hosted in my homelab

The football pool itself

The concept of the pool is incredibly simple. Each week I post the entire NFL schedule of games and each player in the pool goes through and picks their ‘winner’. There are ways to get bonus points for upsets and ‘locks’.

Here are the rules: https://tgfp.us/rules

And yes, I know it’s not a ‘pool’ :)

Goals of this project

I have a couple goals. First, I want to be able to allow anybody to host their own football pool, and have it be as ‘turnkey’ as possible. Secondly, I want to make it even simpler by providing the hosting of the football pool.

Challenges

The main challenges I see at this point to achieving my goals are:

  1. Creating a front end for the administration of the pool. Administration tasks include:
    1. User management
    2. Job monitoring / recovery
  2. Automate some of the tasks that are currently manually done by ME :)
  3. Scaling and Robustness of the final product

Conclusion

Stay tuned for updates as I go through the process, and if you have any thoughts or questions feel free to connect with me on mastodon https://mastodon.social/@johnsturgeon, or create issues on github!

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