Re: Championship Results
 

I think this is the most frustrating part. The FRC community is full of very passionate people who are heavily involved. There are people who have mentored FRC teams longer than I've been alive - think about that. Look at Mike, he's been around since 1996 and he's still involved making an awesome app over 10,000 people have downloaded (not even including iOS, stats aren't listed). That's a kind of sustained devotion other communities would kill to have.

FIRST keeps telling us to "make it loud" and there are many third party solutions out there that take this to heart. But it gets really hard, and really frustrating to do that when the platform we build on top of is unreliable, especially at the premier event of the season. The current situation is definitely better than it was in past years, but it's definitely not up to the level it needs to be in order to make the kind of impact FIRST wants (and deserves).

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - the thing I want to see most in a couple weeks is an in-depth, technical blog post about the issues they've had this season and how they're planning on mitigating them for next season. There is a lot of experience in the community, and there are plenty of people willing to help out, all they have to do is ask. It would appear that all these issues were avoidable.

So yeah, frustrating.

Re: Championship Results
 

From my perspective, I can easily shrug about technical difficulties, but getting the current scores and results out to the people outside the stadium just didn't seem to be a high priority.

Ok, so the state of the art, integrated, near-real time solution that allowed all sorts of integration and APIs and updated itself within seconds broke down. Bummer. Now, though, there are (hundreds? thousands? I really don't know how many) of people who would really like to follow their favorite teams during the day. In the 21st century, that's not a hard problem to solve. Fall back to plan B. thebluealliance.com managed to figure out how to make it happen, for the most part.

It seems, though, that FIRST figured that two updates per day was adequate. That doesn't seem very loud to me.

This was a prime case where my ending slogan of a few recent posts is really applicable. Think outside the walls.

I just hope the problems are solved, or worked around, by tomorrow. My plan is to be pretty glued to the computer watching the action, at least as long as the teams I am familiar with (i.e. mostly Michigan teams) are still in the running.