[TBA] 2015 Season Recap

[Eugene Fang]

Congratulations to everyone who participated in this year's competition!

This season brought some really great updates to The Blue Alliance, thanks to some outstanding effort from our volunteer contributors. Here are some of the major things we launched this season:

• An Android app for easy access from a mobile device (Thanks to Phil Lopreiato, Nathan Walters, Bryce Matsuda, Adam Corpstein, Jerry Morrison, and GitHub user tanis7x)
• myTBA, which lets you subscribe to push notifications for your favorite teams (Thanks to Phil Lopreiato)
• The "live ticker" to GameDay, which was also mobile-optimized and brought into the Android app, so you can watch as updates fly by for your favorite teams of for all events. (Thanks to Phil Lopreiato, Nathan Walters, and Jerry Morrison)
• A brand new datafeed to make use of the new FRC API
• A way for volunteers to input match data in real-time, which was used for Champs

Thanks to everyone's contributions this year we provided information to a record number of people! From February 20 to April 26, we had:

• 983,000 sessions (417,000 desktop, 276,000 mobile web, 290,000 Android)
• 3039 peak concurrent viewers on GameDay
• 3564 new user accounts created
• 320K push notifications sent
• 7.1M API Hits
• 6,000 android app installs
• Thousands of videos added thanks to people helping crowd source

As a reminder, The Blue Alliance is completely powered by volunteers -- if you have a project you want to get involved with, we’ll be happy to have you! Are you graduating high school, want to stay involved with FRC, but don’t have time to mentor a team? Help out TBA -- there are lots of ways to get involved. Much of our data is crowd-sourced; you can help submit match video, or data from offseason events. Our crowd-sourcing efforts are coordinated via our Facebook group -- feel free to post if you want to help out!

All The Blue Alliance software is also fully open-source! Join the mailing list and check out our GitHub, 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 and for the app. We’ll be posting details about a global hackathon later in the summer, which is a great way to start getting involved.

Finally, we’d like to thank our sponsors VEXpro and Firebase who help make the site financially possible.