Description

Covid hit everyone pretty hard in a lot of different ways, only some of which were expected. My brother's dart league in Columbus, OH wanted to keep playing while being following shelter-in-place edicts. Free software designed for this was in its infancy and lacked real-time scorekeeping that people outside of the game could watch.

This is basically what stimulus was invented to do. Users are either admins, team captains or players. Teams are entered as are intervals of play (like a league game every three days or one week, for instance) and the system designs a bracket. On game night, users log in to their own game but can see scoreboards for other games as they happen. Only captains can record scores. After the season is over, the system calculates the team rankings and saves that into a historical record.

The biggest challenge

This was one of the larger dart leagues my brother has belonged to, with a lot of folks who have played locally for a very long time. They wanted live video feeds of each game, but they did't want to pay for any sort of pre-designed system or for hosting (the resources needed for multiple simultaneous video streams couldn't fit on heroku's free tier when that existed). It sufficed for about a year before the league decided to use one of the newer, much larger and scaled competitors with reasonable subscription fees.