I am ecstatic to announce my new project, the Squash Elo Rating System. This project is created for the Carleton Squash Club.
Why?
When attending the club myself and talking to other players I realized there was a need for a system that could help players see their ranking and/or their progress within the game, while having a conversation with a member we concluded that Chess.com Elo rating system would kind of work for our purposes.
So I made this project to solve that very need based on these principles:
- The thing made should be readily accessible to players
- Players should be able to see their ratings, stats, and any other data easily
- The system should be simple and intuitive
What
So what exactly did I make here is the question you might be asking after reading this long.
Discord Bot (Writing)
Responsibilities/features:
- Authentication: The Carleton Squash club is private, is very well maintained and on top of that, is on Discord, which by itself provides so much fine-tuning for the admins that the authentication and thus bad data is handled by the Discord itself.
- Adding players to the system: Players can only be added through Discord.
- Adding match to the system: The match can only be added through Discord. Also, all the data is also sanitized by the bot.
- Stats: Players can see their stats.
The bot is made entirely in Golang, this is first because I love using it and also it had a very easy-to-use package, with great documentation which helped me get started in no time.
https://github.com/bwmarrin/discordgo
The original vision for this system was for it to be only a Discord bot where players can view their rankings through Discord. This vision was then disrupted by the conversation I had with the members of my club about how they would use the bot. From the conversation, I could see that there would be a hindrance in players wanting to see their stats/rankings/matchups, because every time they do, it would be public. This led me to the decision to add a website to the system.
Adding a website was essential because I want my club's players to see all data at all times without having to think about server etiquette.
Website (Reading)
Responsibilities:
- Getting the rankings
- Getting the player's current stats
- Having all player's matchups
- Having a graphic to view players' recent progression
Like I said I wanted the website to be simple, and I don't like writing auth logic so the website is made to be read not write.
The website is also written in Golang because it is the Best language to write servers in.
In conclusion
I would like to thank the president of my club, Noah, for letting me give this project to the community and for helping me improve it with his input.
I would also like to thank Adam an exec in our club who helped me realize that I should not base my DB on Discord Usernames as people can change them, he helped me change it to Discord IDs that are usually only seen at the API level.
I learned a lot with this project, and I put a lot into it, as of now I am in the process of getting this hosted while waiting on the bureaucracy of it all. In the meantime, I wanted to share this project with you. You can find it on my GitHub.