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Pickery.io

Posted on:May 4, 2021 at 03:57 PM

Pickery.io

DORMANT

Pickery: The skill of picking winners. (2017-2019)

Jam-packed with free and premium soccer and basketball leagues and special events from around the world. Swipe to pick your winners. Then come back for live score updates, and see if you got your predictions correct!

And that’s just the commercial tagline!

Pickery followed my development experience as being the second project I always rewrite when picking up a new technology. (see Wobby for the first). We started out as a group on a message board, and doing the tabulation by hand, grew into a Ruby (Sinatra) app, and then grew into a modern hapijs api with a React Native client (yay JavaScript everywhere).

Origins (2014-2018)

Pickery circa 2018

Pickery was originally a derpfootball.com message board game played by community members during English Premier League matches. Players would post their pics to be tabulated by an administrator.

After some attempts at developing a Ruby (no rails, mom!) backend for

Waiting on Builds, I took on the massive effort of turning this into a game. In-way-over-my-head kind of stuff.

This was the time for some dodgy product decisions, too, such as imposing a day-of limitation on when users could pick events done to drive daily traffic but driving two of my eight users nuts.

Solution? Push notifications to remind folks to vote on events; only problem, this is a website. Let’s build an app!

Chapter 3: Pandemic (TBW)

Chapter 4: Moving On (TBW)