Football Pool Website

Type: Website

Source: Personal Project

Language: Ruby on Rails

For a really long time, my family was interested with American football especially the NFL. When I was younger my dad and my mom used to be part of a group of friends that would try to guess which teams would win matches every week. After the games were played, we would compile who got the better scores and keep track of the total for the season to see who could win for all the games in a season.

After going to high school, I decided to keep this tradition going with my friends at school. I went from people to people with all the matches of the week printed on paper and I would have people highlight the teams they thought would win this week. As you can guess, this process was really long. I also had to check out the scores after the weekend and compile the scores for every member and report the scores to people during the week (while getting the picks for next weekend)

Going through this was way too much effort so I stopped keeping up with it for some years. At one point, my parents asked me if I would like to start to make predictions for football games once again. This time, with the knowledge I gained from my University classes, I was way better geared to automate the process and make it easier to deal with. My idea of building a website to keep track of the picks and the scores came after I found out a crowd sourced API for sports matches and scores.

With the help of this API, I started building a website in Ruby on Rails (since Ruby was my goto scripting language). When I needed some online storage space for the picks, I was fortunate to find out about Atlas for MongoDB. With this tool, I could host the database on a server and connect to it from my web application. The website as is was self hosted by me on my own server. I was using a dynamic DNS service to have a domain name attached to the server’s IP.

Unfortunately, the website is kept private so it is not possible for me to link it here for the public to visit but here are some screenshots of the product for the 2020 NFL season.