GameChanger is a data business. Our primary visible product is a suite of apps & a website, but we live to collect piles of raw scoring data and build it up into live streams, text messages, automatic recaps, and crazy stats.
A reality of doing all this is that at various points along the lifecycle of that data, from mobile device to server to user, we need to perform consistent calculations & formatting. We can’t always hit a central server to do the work, and duplicating all of the logic across tiers creates inconsistencies and a maintenance nightmare (trust me). The first step, which is fundamental to how we work, is that our data is structured uniformly across all tiers.
What we’ve done is build a series of tools to make our data manipulation algorithms portable. For statistics, we have a platform-independent markup that we call “stat engine”. By implementing a pretty simple processing engine in each language, we can work on one central configuration document that any end-point can work with. That means the boxscore a user sees live on a phone while scoring is identical to the one our server calculates.
I had little choice with stats (our algorithms are our own, and it’s a very domain-specific problem), but not so with text formatting. Enter Mustache. It’s a super-simple templating markup, and has implementations in all our favorite languages (Javascript, Python, Obj-C). Since our data stays uniformly represented as it passes through these layers, I can apply the same set of templates at any point in the lifecycle: on the device immediately after it’s created, server-side when I have to, and in the browser during live-streaming situations.
Mustache is also letting me start to unify templating languages. Currently, we use Django templating for server-side page rendering, and then use a combination of TrimPath and raw Javascript string manipulation to do browser-side rendering. My new goal is to start moving all of our HTML templating to Mustache, because then I can render components seamlessly in either tier, which makes for much easier development of dynamic page generation, “ajax”-y partial page refreshes, etc.
These two tools let me destroy bottlenecks by moving processing to wherever it’s convenient, and offer features cross-platform with very low development cost. And that’s pretty awesome.
(afterthought: my one hurdle thus far is dealing with the “logicless” nature of Mustache- I’ve found myself making some changes to data formats to support this better, but I’m still learning how to get the most from the markup)
