[FRC BLOG] The Great Registration System Crash of 2016

[Foster]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

FIRST should be able to handle a few thousand page requests at once. If they can't, any number of outside firms I'm sure would love to have a contract to do this. This isn't an insurmountable challenge.

Fake News Item: Today FIRST announced that it had outsourced it's entire application suite to a major cloud vendor to improve a computer issue that happens one day per year. In related news, FIRST raised the cost of the initial registration and event by $1800. (*)

I'm not sure why a FIRST Choice like thing wouldn't work. You put your choices in by order you want them. Random selection of team. Is regional / district event available? Yes then book. No then look at second request. Is it booked, Yes then book, No then look at third request, and so on.

Since they hold slots back for rookies, they could easily do this years rookies first (in a random pick) and then the rest of the pool.

That would be far easier to manage and a better use of mentor time than hovering over keyboards trying to snipe a regional like you do a classic Beanie Baby on E-Bay.

Edited to add: The idea by nuclearnerd is also pretty good. It appears we were typing at the same time.

(*) Outsourcing / cloud services are not the inexpensive panacea that many people think. Yea, Yea "well I can spin up an Amazon instance in just a few seconds" sounds easy as heck in a robotics forum, not so easy to do in the real world, especially if you need to manage 1000 transactions per second for any time period.

Those of you that are ready to pound on your keyboards to refute me, don't bother. American has a ton of flights into Manchester, book one and go help them out.