Sports Tree
Sports Tree is an interactive sports-media platform that generates engagement through various forms of content, ranging from sportscasts, blogs, analysis (picks), trivia raffles, and bracket challenges.
In my role as project lead, I assumed broader responsibilities beyond software development, including liaising with stakeholders, defining project scopes, and offering technical expertise.
The development of the platform started from ground up, beginning with architecture design. This included a customer facing front-end application, admin and content-creation dashboards, a back-end server, and adjacent services such as Firebase, Stripe, and more.
Built on NextJS, the front-end utilizes tools like TailwindCSS and Redux to ensure a smooth user experience. The website is fully responsive, delivering precise UI across various screen sizes and resolutions. Additionally, nearly all content is dynamic, allowing for easy customization of features such as blogs, sportscasts, picks, interactive fantasy bracket challenges, and trivia raffles through content-creation dashboards, with changes reflecting instantly on the site.
Nav menu showcasing dynamic bracket challenge, trivia raffle, and picks.
All of the content is created in the content-creation system, powered by Sanity and Studio - its SPA content management solution. Out of the box, the system provides a dashboard that allows creation of basic content types such as text and images. Building on top of this I designed various data structures, as well as custom React components that operate on the data structures, and embedded them into the dashboard. This offered a highly customizable experience that enables their content creators to easily create complex pieces, such as fantasy bracket challenges and trivia raffles.
Interactive fantasy bracket challenge page.
While submitting brackets and trivia entries appear straightforward from the perspective of users, they can involve intricate problems behind the scenes. For example, as user participation in fantasy bracket submissions and trivia raffles grew, manual parsing became impractical. To address this, I developed automated workflows that handle the parsing of bracket submissions and trivia raffle entries. These automated processes are triggered as CRON jobs based on scheduled dates set by Sports Tree content creators. They trigger scoring and selection algorithms on our platform's backend server, and securely fetch the generated results.
For fantasy brackets, the automated workflow includes scoring calculations using specific algorithms. It incorporates fault-tolerant mechanisms to retry scoring in case of failures, ensuring all submissions are accurately scored. Once scoring is complete, the workflow identifies winners, and all user information along with their submissions is accessible through the dashboard.
Sports Tree fantasy bracket scoring guidelines.
Regarding trivia raffles, the automated workflows execute a selection algorithm to randomly pick winners from trivia submissions. The results of these selections are then presented in the dashboard for transparency and user engagement.
The platform also manages numerous other intricacies, including different levels of content access based on subscription tiers and the unlocking of content.
Sports Tree subscription tiers.
Overall, the platform ensures a smooth experience for both Sports Tree and its users by seamlessly implementing comprehensive features from start to finish. Automation is leveraged to enhance operational efficiency, while integrations with third-party APIs such as Firebase and custom Stripe integration broaden functionality and enrich user interaction.
Seamless in-app custom Stripe integration.
The project was highly successful, and Sports Tree has returned on multiple occasions to request for the development of additional features!