Monthly Archives: February 2014

Meta, ottoneu, Software Development

Auction Drafts, ottoneu, and you

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Tonight, two leagues had long delays with their auction drafts. I want to write about what happened, the full context around the circumstances, and how it will be fixed going forward. I think it is very important to be transparent about these issues to show how ottoneu is going to improve to address these concerns.

At 3:07pm ET, I received this tweet:

I am currently in Copenhagen, Denmark on vacation from my day job, and my data plan is wonky to say the least. I received tweets regarding this issue for the next hour:

I also received a number of emails during this time period.

I happened to see this last tweet when opening my Twitter client on my phone. Up to this point in the trip, I received push notifications upon new tweets, but this time I didn’t see anything until I happened to open my phone’s client. As soon as I saw these tweets, I rushed back to the apartment I am staying in and spent about 2 minutes debugging the issue and resolving it.

There are a number of questions about this scenario:

  1. Why was the issue not acknowledged earlier?
  2. How was it fixed so quickly when it was open for so long?
  3. Why are there so many issues with auction drafts on ottoneu?

I will address each of these issues in order. Of course, if you have other concerns, I’m more than happy to address them over email or in the comments.

1. Why was the issue not acknowledged earlier?

I am in Denmark right now, for my first vacation since July of last year. Unlike last July or the previous vacation in November 2012, my laptop was not with me the entire trip and I did not put someone else in charge of any issues in my absence. This is also my first trip during the peak ottoneu months, which are February and March, when all the auction drafts occur. Finally, while I expected Twitter push notifications to my phone, I did not receive any this evening.

Solution:

While ottoneu does not make very much money at all, what little I do make this year will go towards a small laptop that I can keep on my person throughout February and March. I will also be more conscientious of vacations during this time, and much closer to this or some computer during this time, until ottoneu makes enough money to warrant a second employee. There is no excuse for this not being addressed faster during such a sensitive time.

2. How was it fixed so quickly when it was open for so long?

Plenty of ottoneu issues are actually quite simple, and only come up when some code I hastily write is pushed into production. In this case, I did a big rewrite of the auction draft in the offseason to try and improve performance. Part of this was to introduce redis to the ottoneu technology stack. Redis comes highly recommended from the aforementioned day job, and I have some experience with it but I made a couple of fairly simple mistakes. These cropped up quickly when faced with production load, and I was able to sort them out and resolve them quickly.

Solution:

See the above – faster response time will almost always mean a faster resolution. A longer-term outlook has a better test environment and more robust testing, but honestly that is a luxury right now.

3. Why are there so many issues with auction drafts on ottoneu?

While no one has straight-up asked me this question, this is a question I ask myself often. There are basically two competing interests:

1) auctions are hard to schedule and when they are scheduled, everyone wants to run their auction.
2) auctions are computationally difficult to keep real-time, and they are also very sensitive to errors, so there should be 100% confidence in live auction drafts when they are run.

There are two solutions that I am capable of: the first is rewriting large portions of the auction draft code to use more redis and less database. Database bad, cache good. The second is to invest in more servers. I plan on doing the former extensively, as talking to a few colleagues indicates that this will increase capacity considerably. I’ve already done this a bit, and I hope to do this more.

I’ve already increased the number of auction drafts that can run at a single time by 50% over last year. I’m hoping to pop it up to a full 100% and then start exploring more server capacity. So this is a “stay-tuned”, but is also a catch-22, because like I said earlier, ottoneu really doesn’t make much money at all (it was a net-loss the last two years even without any full-time employees). So until ottoneu truly has enough users to afford more server capacity, more efficient code is the best way forward. Like I said, I will continue to work towards this end to make this a reality.

That is the full situation around the issue tonight and the overall auction draft issue. I’m back home in 2 days and will be vigilant on any draft issues through April, when capacity drops considerably and we return to the predictable, boring, wonderful grind of a new baseball season. I hope this has been helpful, and please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns.

ottoneu, Software Development

Going in to 2014

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Man, I forgot about this place. No time for apologies, let’s get into it.

It is February 19, 2014. There is a high likelihood of a lot of new users coming to ottoneu in the next month before the season starts, but let’s look at where things are now, shall we?

  1. 1917 active teams.
  2. 25 active prize leagues and 123 active non-prize leagues.
  3. 401,293 player transactions, spending $538,395 in ottoneu cap.

I’m going to throw a parade when we get over $1mil in cap spent. There are a few other important things to note, especially in regards to the now woefully outdated first 30 days post. My users remain incredibly patient and smart and understanding. The number of “shit is broken” emails have decreased to a trickle – ottoneu has become a relatively stable (KNOCK ON WOOD) platform! Even the auction drafts are performing smoothly, to the point where most of the emails about them are for really interesting feature enhancements, not “man this was slow, give me some money back.”

So, that is the basic state of things today. Now, what are the big things on the horizon? Well, there are 3 big initiatives this year, each worthy of its own series of posts:

  1. Rewriting the stats backend – after determining that a soft innings cap (and thus allowing pitcher streaming on the last day of the season) was a double-edged sword for owners and self-balancing, there is a massive opportunity for performance improvements and general efficiency with ottoneu’s stats backend. This project is ongoing and should be wrapping up in the next couple of weeks. It should be completely transparent to users, and it has to get done before the season starts. So, that’s priority #1.
  2. A better lineup page experience – the lineups page is fine, it gets the job done. But during the long baseball season, this is where a lot of time is spent. It also is the basis for the off-season roster organizer. More stats, splits, and a smoother experience swapping players in and out will go a long way towards making ottoneu feel world-class.
  3. A full redesign – while I may have sentimental attachment to the Waste Management colors and my crazy-good (read: not) logo, I think ottoneu can look significantly better. This project is actually really close to being done, but probably won’t be released until the All-Star break, just to tighten everything up and not get in the way of the top two priorities. The new logo looks boss.

That is where things stand going into this season. I plan on keeping a loose development blog here, so feel free to comment here, tweet at me, hit me up on Facebook, or just plain email me (help at ottoneu dot com). I cannot wait for baseball. Good luck this season!