Year 3: My NFL Score Prediction App on the Google Play Store

I'm about to kick off my third consecutive year as an app developer with my NFL Score Prediction app on the Google Play Store.

I started work on this application in January of 2016, over five years ago. Since then the web app has gone through various iterations, and over the past three years I've solidified some of design concepts.

One of the biggest design decisions for me was to make the application anonymous. To pay homage of the Internet of yesteryear, I only ask for a username and a password. I don't collect E-mail addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, ask you for your identity, or anything. Why not?

Let's face it. This is an application that collects score predictions for football games. Do I really need to know anything else from my users? Nope. It's just for fun. It's not that serious.

One of the new functionalities for this year (2021-22)

Some updates for this year include a page that tracks your accuracy with some "visual analytics" which are in fact, bar graphs. I've also included the ability to view any users progress, whereas in the past I limited the Leaderboard to the Top 25 users only.

Some features that I should probably include going forward are: Detailed tracking of wrong and inaccurate predictions, and the ability to share your prowess with a "Share" button social media, maybe a button to randomize picks for each week. Just some ideas.

To help promote this app, I've started filming some YouTube videos where I break down my predictions.

As the season progresses I will upload some more videos to showcase the application. - Mike

Rate My Swag (.app) is here!!!

A screenshot from http://www.RateMySwag.app

Over the past couple of weeks I developed a new web application, called "Rate My Swag." The concept is simple. You upload a photo, and users rate your swag from 1 to 100. The ratings are aggregated and the photos are ranked, from MOST to LEAST swag.

This is a similar design to such popular sites as "Hot or Not." I read a great article on that site here: https://blog.photofeeler.com/hot-or-not/.

I got the wheels running on Rate My Swag quickly. I wrote and rolled out a production version of this application within the month of July.

Anyway... check it out at http://www.RateMySwag.app or on the Google Play Store, here.

I built my dream app, and this is what happened

It took me two years of work to create my dream app. It's on the Google Play Store here, for now at least. The vision was clear, as were the motivations. To create an app that allows a userbase to predict the final score of a sports game, on an active "leaderboard" type of "Buddy List." This way, you could interact with friends in a light-hearted way in terms of who really knows what they're talking about before Sunday's Bears-Packers game.

 

I completed all work by myself, without help from anyone else. The first step was to create an LLC, just incase I were to receive investor interest. Then I weighed options to host the web application.

Over the two years it took to complete the app, I used Bluehost and BuyVM. Bluehost is helpful for a beginner, because they lay out the backend architecture of your site with a friendly GUI and set of menus. BuyVM requires more know-how and I wouldn't have been able to complete the setup without the knowledge I gained over the course of my tenure as a sys admin/ web app dev at a University.

In terms of the actual code writing, the most difficult aspects were the front-end interface and UX, the Leaderboard, the login mechanisms, and the overall design. I went through several iterations of the forward-facing markup before I settled on the W3.css I used for the PWA version of the app.

The backend scripting was all just written freestyle. The Leaderboard was the most challenging aspect and I actually legitimately failed trying to write it once. After a took a couple of months off I returned with a clearer vision for the Leaderboard and was able to complete it.

The app is heavily automated and updates on a single script execution that I do manually. The app would be fully automated if I were to pay for a service to put the final scores into a text file for me, but for now I do it myself. Once the scores are in the text file I just execute a single script and that updates the Leaderboard. As for building the app, it's also just a single script that completes that based off of the NFL Schedule as stored in a CSV.

I guess this puts a nail in the coffin into any conversations about, "I will create an app and become a millionaire." Hardly. I lost money making this. This should also put nails into the coffin on "portability." I wrote this app and ported it everywhere, from Ubuntu to Mac to Windows 10 to CentOS, building on production servers, and local machines regularly.

The two years I spent building this free application wasn't a total waste of my time. Over the course of creating the pages I studied Linear Algebra by myself and came to understand n-dimensionality in a proper fashion. I used a book I'd highly recommend by I.M. Gel'fand called "Lectures on Linear Algebra" and found it was quite useful and relevant to the idea of manipulating a creative idea in hyperspace. Had I not challenged myself, I would be less enriched.

But what about... the problem with the tech industry

Over the process of attempting to secure another full-time position in the technology field I've reached an impasse of 'no return' considerations. Online and paper job applications are sent out, sixty to a hundred at a time (over the course of a couple of weeks), and there are replies. The phone screen, the phone interview, the in-person interview, the committee interview, the HR interview, the phone calls with status inquiry, the final interviews with the manager, the weeks of waiting with no response, I've seen and done it all. Several times over. And yet, I've not received any offers to my liking. Why would I want to work for a company that mistreats me during the interview? Yes, this has happened. However, the most common phrase I've heard during interviews is, "But what about..."  Fill in the blank.

It could be anything.  And this, in my opinion, is the problem with the tech field. There's always something else. So you're an expert at PHP, or writing Javascript. So what?

What about CakePHP and Zend, and Elastic Beanstalk, and Bamboo, and CodeIgnite, and Perl, and Python, and C++ and Informatica, and Unit Tests in C? Mulesoft? You can literally go on forever with endless flavors of technology as components (and their subcomponents). Platforms, code languages, stack varieties, specializations... Are you an expert in VOIP and subnets? How about traffic masking, or sub-routing IP tasks through a LAN? Are you able to generate visual data with R? What are some alternatives to database replication? Splunk? What is your experience with high-traffic, forward facing dynamic pages that are based on transactional frameworks?   How about consumer-based technology, e-Commerce? Re-clustering of a Virtual HPC stack? What about SDKs? Are you an expert with Java? What about Mobile technology? Know how to write in responsive design? Experience with Machine Learning? How about Cocoa? Digital image optimization and the Adobe Suite? Have you performed a RAID recently? Drupal? Wordpress? Dealing with clients? Our company is very stressful, how can I be sure you are able to deal with this? Writing authentication modules with LDAP? Federations? Editing CPP files? Can you provide database snapshots? AWS, Virtual Machines, Akamai, NodeJS, Load balancer performance tuning... Shall I keep going? Docker, Chef, Puppet, stacktrace, udap... Salt...

Let's say you can do all of this. Great. And... you have experience with all of it. Still you're left with a potential response of, "But what about..." And you're expected to not laugh. I actually created a meme recently but removed it from the Internet for fear it was too risqué. It was a photo of Albert Einstein with the caption, "We regret to inform you we have selected another, more qualified candidate. We were looking for someone with more experience with Amazon Web Services." Oh! The irony...

No one can know everything. It's a virtue to admit you know nothing at all. And yet, in the tech world you are expected to have experience with and know everything about everything. It's simply unrealistic.

How are you to gain experience with everything if your past positions were limited in any way? Surely you're looking for a new opportunity for some sort of progressively-tinged reason?

Gone are the days a man can put on his best suit, get a shoe shine and walk into a proper office building with a resume and receive a job offer the next day. We're in the age of information overload and it's going out of control at an alarming rate.  Notice how fast the Internet is now? The speed has increased in the past year alone. Wait, there's something faster than dial-up? ...Just kidding. Still, how about those sorting algorithms? Are they working for you to find any small thing you might want on the Internet? And the sheer amount of content? It's mind boggling and unnatural. Nothing seems special anymore, but I believe this assertion is incorrect. There are still special things out there, but you must work to uncover them, in your psyche and in your natural life. Peace and serenity come from within.

I'm not sure if I will be able to land another job in technology and it seems as though I may not be able to, but I won't lose any sleep over it. I've been there and seen it, at a high level and from various angles and contextual involvements. Too many hands in the kitchen and nothing gets done. Incomplete instructions yield poor results. Often times in tech you'll hear something along the lines of, "We want to use this new software but we're not really sure what it is or how it's going to work or anything about it all really, but I want you to figure everything out about it and present a report, so we can potentially implement it." I'd like to include a metaphor that likens ordering a sandwich at a deli with software management, but I'll skip it and summarize my thoughts.

Automation is taking over. The necessity of a back-end web developer may no longer exist in the space of a few years. At least their vitality will have depleted. The Internet may reach a state of diminishing returns wherein all content is so heavily automated we won't need people to rearrange any back-end stuff on any web application anymore. We will be forced to ask ourselves, "What do I really want to consume via the Internet?" and will have to act accordingly, or be subject to the "mind control" tactics of large corporations to color our digital existence.

The answer to a 'True or False' question is not subjective, so long as it's already written into memory. Where probability is concerned it's not much for Math.