[TBA] 2016 Season Recap

[Eugene Fang]

That’s another season in the books!

2016 was a huge season for The Blue Alliance. Our volunteer contributors built some really awesome features this season, including:

Complete rework of the Android app for faster loading
Direct robot photo uploads (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=20305&d=1457541145) from the Android app
Detailed 2016-specific event statistics (http://www.thebluealliance.com/event/2016carv#event-insights) and match breakdowns (http://www.thebluealliance.com/match/2016carv_qf3m2)
The myTBA dashboard (http://www.thebluealliance.com/mytba) to easily follow your favorite teams
Match and ranking predictions (http://www.thebluealliance.com/event/2016new/insights)


If you enjoyed the Android app, be sure to leave a review (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thebluealliance.androidclient)!

Thanks to everyone’s contributions we reached a record number of people! Here are some numbers comparing Feb. 21 - May 1, 2016 to Feb. 20 - April 26, 2015:

1.97M total sessions comprising of 612K desktop, 584K mobile web, and 776K Android vs. 2015’s 983K total (417K desktop, 276K mobile web, 290K Android)
336K unique users (321K web, 15K Android) vs. 2015’s 228K (221K web, 7K android)
7.7M web pageviews vs. 2015’s 4.7M
4.6M Android screen views vs. 2015’s 1.3M
4608 peak concurrent viewers on GameDay vs. 2015’s 3039
7643 new user accounts created vs. 2015’s 3564
13,440 total accounts at the end of the season vs. 2015’s 5066
696K push notifications sent vs. 2015’s 320K
11.2M API hits vs. 2015’s 7.1M
8.8K new Android app installs vs. 2015’s 6K
17.5K total Android app installs vs. 2015’s 7.6K


Remember, The Blue Alliance is completely powered by volunteers. If you have new features you want to build or just want to get involved to learn and get experience with software development, we’ll be happy to have you and assist you along the way! The Blue Alliance is fully open-source, so join the mailing list (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/thebluealliance-developers) and check out our GitHub (https://github.com/the-blue-alliance), which has getting started guides for both the website and Android app. If you’re not sure where to start contributing, take a look at the hackathon ideas list for the website (https://github.com/the-blue-alliance/the-blue-alliance/labels/Help%20Wanted) and for the app (https://github.com/the-blue-alliance/the-blue-alliance-android/labels/hackathon), or get involved with the first version of our iOS app (https://github.com/the-blue-alliance/the-blue-alliance-ios) which is coming soon. We have a lot of exciting ideas for the next year and will be posting details about a global hackathon later in the summer, which is a great way to start getting involved. You can also get involved by helping out with our crowd-sourcing data efforts which are coordinated via our Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/moardata).

We’d like to thank FIRST’s API team who has made it so much easier for us to get official event results, as well as our sponsors VEXpro (http://www.vexrobotics.com/vexpro/) and Firebase (https://www.firebase.com/) who make the site financially possible.

Finally, thanks again to everyone who submitted videos and pictures, our data admins, and our Twitch mods.

Web contributors:

Phil Lopreiato (phil-lopreiato)
Greg Marra (gregmarra)
Kunal Mehta (legoktm)
David Thomas (synth3tk)
Kevin Ji (mc10)
Christopher Licata (cmlicata)
Bryce Matsuda (brycematsuda)
Nathan Walters (nwalters512)
Ben Visness (bvisness)
Christian Steward (csteward24)
Nightpool
Tyler Carter (chacha)
DNGros
Rselwyn


Android contributors:

Phil Lopreiato (phil-lopreiato)
Nathan Walters (nwalters512)
Jerry Morrison (1fish2)
SunnyRaj
David Thomas (synth3tk)
Michael Chinn (Mechinn)


iOS contributors:

Zach Orr (ZachOrr)
Brandon Dean (brandondean)

[plnyyanks]

Again, huge thanks to everybody who contributed code, robot images, and match videos this year - TBA is totally community driven and wouldn't be anywhere near where it is today without your support.

Now that it's the end of the season, as you lay on your couch recovering from Uber-flu (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=148044) and happen to have a cool idea you'd like to see from TBA in the future, don't hesitate to drop us a line!

And if you'd like to help contribute, we'll be happy to help get you bootstrapped as well.

[Akash Rastogi]

Can't thank the TBA contributors enough for maintaining and growing such a great site and app! This continues to be one of the best resources we have in FRC.

[Ben Martin]

I used TBA for one reason or another every day this season. Thank you for all the hard work you guys put in for the community.

[synth3tk]

Thanks to everyone involved, whether through submitting code, bug reports, suggestions, or media! It's been amazing to see how many people use TBA.

I'm looking for some help with the Windows app, too! If you know or want to learn C#, get in touch.

[lynca]

Keep up the great work everybody !

We still need lots of people to help submit videos and photos. We are missing a lot of videos from Champs !

We need people to help finish off videos from Hopper, Curie, Carver and Carson !

[jtrv]

Thank you so much for providing such an incredible and reliable service. Making everybody's lives easier - scouts, developers, you name it. Awesome work.

P.S. When that media award was being presented at championships, Twitch chat was spamming "Give it to TBA".

[Richard Wallace]

Thank you, TBA contributors! Hands down, this is the best app I've used to follow FRC, at home and at events. It is nice to be able to focus on my team and my volunteer roles, knowing that TBA will keep me from missing the competitive picture.

[Jcarbon]

Thanks to everybody who works on TBA for providing such a fantastic service. I found the match breakdowns especially helpful this year to easily see where the points in a match came from without having to watch it.

[Tungrus]

Thank you! This is the best app I have ever used.

[GuyM142]

I can't imagine this season without TBA!
This is definitely a part of the FIRST experience to keep track of other teams and events during the competition weeks and it's all possible thanks to you!