It isn’t often I take up some blog space to brag about myself in the past. Today I had a phone call from someone interested in one of my past projects, TeaserLeague.com.
Teaser League is a game that I often describe as a football survival pool with a team based rotisserie element to it. Aside from the sports element, there was a lot of database and back end architecture that I got to contribute to the project:
- Database Design
- Database Performance Tuning
- Automation Process for standings, new membership, and real-time NFL scores.
One of my favorite resources for tuning our MySQL database was the MySQL Performance Blog. They have a lot of information on just about any topic you need. For us, it was how to make the database run as fast as possible, with a lot of heavy queries, and a lot of simultaneous connections. We were gearing up for a 250,000 member web site, with most everyone active all day Sunday.
I had my first chance at writing production C code. We decided to write our first breed of automation scripts in C in an attempt to pull the most performance possible out of our linux servers. I didn’t know Python, and C seemed a better route than Perl. Nothing against Perl, but we could have just as easily used PHP, and not accomplished what we wanted. I should note that in the end, we had mostly PHP scripts, and just a couple C scripts pushing the back end.
Another aspect that I really enjoyed was the chance to interact with the community. I was asked if I would handle our social media aspects, and setup a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account for the site. I pushed those pretty good, and built a pretty decent following. I was even able to get Ochocinco to read one my responses to him, but couldn’t get him to RT me. My guess is he was restricted from anything that resembled a gambling site, even though we were for entertainment only.
I miss working with a community. It was a nice break form the hectic and sometime grueling task of coding. I’m still working on getting LivingPoetic.com up and running, and hope to break back into some community management this fall.
Speaking of social networking, I could use a few followers in Twitter. Please follow me: @iamdanjoseph — I promise I’ll follow back.
