Pista started as a way for me to keep track of Padel. If you don't know what Padel is, here is a good link. Well, it's not Pickleball. It's a very dynamic and currently my favorite racket sport.
Padel has been growing a lot. There is a lot of interest for this sport to come here to the US. One of my friends opened a club here in Chicago and it's been great. This year saw a lot of changes as far as professional leagues go. At the moment, there are 4 pro leagues. The history of all of this kind of takes away from this project, but it is important to know that the whole sport is going through big changes. Positive ones as well.
One of the shifts was to have 4 pro leagues. As you can imagine, it becomes hard to follow the tournaments and even answer simple questions like: "Is there a tournament this week?". This constant shift of the sport also impacted the dev work I was doing.
Back in the day, it was hard to find a livestream on Youtube, so the "Livestreams" feature came about. I thought we would want to persist those so folks could watch them later, but it turns out that a lot of the channels delete the videos after they are livestreamed, leaving you with weird a broken link. At the moment, I persist things, but that's mostly legacy stuff and could go away. It turns out that if it's not live, folks don't care about it. This is the case because there is always something else live now :), one of the changes happening in Padel now. It's not uncommon to see 15 different livestreams be live at the same time on a Saturday.
As far as architecture, there are a few things I'd likely do differently now that I know the problem a little bit more. I'd experimented with a few different features only to see that nobody really cared for them :) That's dev.
Yes, I should use more Ecto enums, maybe use Oban, but, life is short. The app performs flawlessly as it is and I shipped it. Shipping feels good.
Pista can be found here: https://www.pista.cloud, it's a small Fly app. So far, it has performed fairly well, no complaints. Plausible has also been cool to understand the usage. Turns out that we have one pro player at the highest (he is a family friend) that uses the app to sign up, follow results. Folks at the academy he trains also are frequent users.
I built Pista with mobile in mind, although I then learned that folks would open it up in a big monitor and play the livestreams directly from their computer. It looks ok on desktop, but it was built with mobile in mind.
To dev, this is a straight forward liveview app backed by postgres. The usual steps apply here as well. To start your Phoenix server:
mix setupMIX_ENV=dev iex -S mix phx.server, or./dev_server_iex.sh- seed the database -> run
Pista.OneTime.SeedsYoutubeLivestreams.call()
Now you can visit localhost:4000 from your browser.
Get an iex session and run Pista.OneTime.SeedsYoutubeLivestreams.call() to
get some YouTube livestreams in the db and then the worker will pick it up.
I say we in a codebase, mostly due to habit, even when I'm doing solo work.
There are a few features that would be interesting to build:
- Support the vastly used "Americano" format for group play (teaching pros use it often to organize games)
- Draw (brackets) creation for tournaments
- League management
- Continue working with pro tournament results and do something with the output
- One interesting idea is to have a blob of results, get a just released draw and feed both the historical data and also the current matchups into some LLM and write "pre" tournament analysis pieces. Could generate some content like that, potentially sell it to the news folks in an automated way