This is a project I threw together in roughly two weeks that tracks the results of my family's football pool. The football pool is fairly simple in its rules; members of our family each "own" an NFL football team, and the winners are determined based on how the teams play. I threw the site together so that there could be a tracker for the results of the football pool, as well as the results of the current NFL week's scores.
I used this flask-empty repository (which itself is powered by cookiecutter) to create the initial skeleton for this project.
I chose Flask because:
- I have previous experience with Flask applications in a work environment.
- This project is extremely lightweight and doesn't need a lot of the included batteries that Django offers.
- Both Django and Flask are the only two frameworks I had any experience in, and I wanted the website available by the start of the season.
I'm a big fan of devcontainers (especially in VSCode), so I spent the first day making a devcontainer from scratch.
It's not super powerful or re-usable, but it fits the needs of the project pretty well so I like it a lot.
With respect to my devcontainer "build plans", I generally combine a Docker Compose file, a Dockerfile, and a devcontainer.json file within the .devcontainer directory to make productionizing a bit easier.
For the front-end, I leveraged tailwindcss, which I've come to really enjoy for how simple it can make front-end design.
Here's a free secret: if you're not skilled with front-end and you aren't using a component library, you're only hurting yourself.
My component library of choice is DaisyUI.
And having a 🤖 like ChatGPT available to help with the templating, styling, etc. definitely doesn't hurt. 😉
The back-end was a lot easier, it combines the power of pydantic with your general web-app capabilities, like database integration.
The pydantic comes into play when reading the live game results from ESPN's API.
As mentioned above, the fact that I used a devcontainer made making the production container much easier. Much of the work was already in place, it just took a few modifications to ensure that the production container would be a bit smaller and more secure. I also had to change some aspects of the implementation so that it fits the need of my production environment. I'm being intentionally vague here, but just know it took a few tries to get it right!
After I got it running, it was the simple matter of initializing the database, running the migrations to get everything created, then seeding the database.
There have definitely been bugs, but flask shell is a really awesome command that allows me to do things within the database (or otherwise) that utilizes the currently running app.
That I love development, dude. It isn't often that I get a sudden strike of inspiration like this, but I absolutely could not put this idea away once it came to me. It was really cool to see this come together over the course of two weeks or so. I also learned a ton about the history of the football pool and my family -- I'm so lucky to have such an amazing family that can support and enjoy a project like this one!