Monthly Archives: June 2015

Fantasy Football, ottoneu, Software Development

Join the ottoneu Fantasy Football Beta Test

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Fantasy Football season is coming up and ottoneu Fantasy Football is getting ready to launch, but not without your help! Last winter, there was a brief alpha test, and now it is again time to pull some of you together for a beta test.

The test will focus on the following areas:

  1. The Auction Draft – is it fast enough? Do your bids register?
  2. Lineups – this page has been rebuilt from the ground up! Is it intuitive to use? (This is where I’ll heavily need beta testers’ feedback)
  3. General navigation of the Football site

Interested? Of course you are! To participate, you only need to do two things:

  1. Like ottoneu on Facebook
  2. Leave a comment on ottoneu’s wall about who you’d nominate first overall in your ottoneu Fantasy Football draft

Do these two things by Wednesday, and I’ll pick a few of you to check out ottoneu Fantasy Football before anyone else!

Fantasy Baseball, Fantasy Football, Meta, ottoneu, Software Development, Startups

Weekly Summary: Improving Baseball

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I read through all the comments in the post about the database and realized something important: some ottoneu Fantasy Baseball players seem to think Baseball is going to be negatively affected by Football. Nothing could be further from the truth. While ottoneu is a one-person (me!) company, there is currently enough time in the day to keep building and improving both Fantasy Football and Fantasy Baseball until there is enough revenue to justify growing the company. Now, onward to the Fantasy Baseball improvements!

First, the Trade Wizard now has a confirmation screen, so you can double-check your trade offer before it ends up in someone else’s hands. This much-requested feature should reduce the number of loan mistakes in your trade offers and allow for more complicated trade offers to be put together.

Second, the Live page was re-written to make it faster to see how other teams in your league are doing. It is still a little slow to initially load, and I’m continuing to make that page faster since I know the majority of you check it daily.

Third, the Roster Organizer was made accessible year-round, as some owners indicated that they’d like to use this planning tool even while the season is on-going.

Fourth, I rolled out some new information on player cards. Average salaries, projected positional eligibility, and ownership percentages are now available on player cards, so you can make smarter personnel decisions.

Finally, I’ve started work on a tool that will allow commissioners to retroactively change lineups. It is being built to directly address the kind of data loss that occurred last Friday. This tool will have a significant number of checks in place to prevent it from being used inappropriately. I’m hoping to roll it out to a few leagues towards the end of this season and it should be available to all baseball leagues this off-season.

On the Football side, more steps were taken to ensure that another database event never occurs. I now feel confident that the mistake I made Friday night cannot be replicated, and that if another database event occurs due to my error or any other reason that there are more fallbacks than were in place last week.

As always, find me on Slack, e-mail, or leave a comment here.

Meta, Software Development

Database issue on 6/12-6/13

34 Comments

It’s a little after 1am ET on Saturday, June 13th, and I’m about to get ottoneu back up after messing up the database about 1.5 hours ago.

I’m working on getting ottoneu Fantasy Football ready for this fall, and in setting up some testing this evening I accidentally ran some operations meant for the football database on the baseball database. The end result is that all lineup changes made on Friday, June 12th have been irrecoverably lost.

I apologize, of course. It is unacceptable for a fantasy game to lose even a tiny bit of integrity in scoring.

The bright side, if you can call it that, is two-fold: 1) whoever you had in your lineup for Thursday will get stats on Friday, so teams will not get 0s across the board, and 2) this affects everyone equally.

Again, I apologize. I am working very hard on making ottoneu a world-class fantasy experience, and tonight was a slight misstep. I will do everything in my power to prevent mistakes like this from occurring in the future. As always, please reach out to me via email if you have any concerns or would like to have a longer conversation.

UPDATE: Just realized that if you started an auction on 6/12, it will probably need to be started again. Trades may also need to be re-accepted too – if this is causing a significant problem, please let me know. I’m hoping that because it was only one day, it shouldn’t have too great an impact.

UPDATE 2: I have made the following measures to prevent these events from occurring in the future: 1) database backups every other hour instead of once a day, 2) a change to how I connect to the ottoneu database

UPDATE 3: I’ve taken more steps to ensure this kind of mistake won’t happen again. I’m looking into building a tool that would allow commissioners to retroactively change lineups, though the jury is still out on if this is a good idea or a reasonable response to losing one day’s worth of lineup changes in 3+ seasons. Comments, Slack, and email remain the best ways to reach out!

Fantasy Baseball, Fantasy Football, ottoneu, Software Development

Week 2: Baseball Scores and Football Drafts

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Last week was all about creating and joining football leagues. This week was wider in scope and full of interesting changes.

On the ottoneu Fantasy Baseball side, I pestered FanGraphs into giving me live scores of MLB games. By pester, I mean I asked nicely once. Integrating this data was not hard, and now live game scores are on the Live and Lineups pages. Doubleheaders are presented better on both of these pages as well. Now you can keep tabs on both your fantasy players and your favorite team from one page!

A lot of progress was made on ottoneu Fantasy Football this past week. Leagues can be created and joined and (most importantly to me!) paid for, which are the majority of the milestones ahead of release. Today I started working on another major milestone: the auction draft. The interface is going to look a lot like the ottoneu Fantasy Baseball system one for now. However, player search is much faster and drafts should generally go much quicker, since there will only be 20 roster spots to fill instead of 40.

I also experimented with Flex and Superflex on the new lineup pages. The good news is that they both now work properly. The even better news is that proof-of-concept 1 Flex, 2 Flex, and Flex+Superflex roster arrangements all work properly, which means that ottoneu Fantasy Football will launch with some form of lineup customizability. Between this and the scoring options, ottoneu Fantasy Football’s week to week experience should be varied and interesting for all kinds of fantasy football owners.

This upcoming week is going to be all about the auction draft. I’m hoping it will go quickly by utilizing the best parts of the ottoneu Fantasy Baseball auction draft system. There could be an alpha test as early as mid-June on some of these features, so please let me know in the comments if you are interested!