At GameChanger, we have a dedicated App Platform team that focuses on scaling our engineering organization and supporting development teams across the company. Our mission is to make building things the right way the easy way for all developers at GameChanger. This involves: Implementing and maintai...

At GameChanger, video streaming has become a huge part of our business and thus our tech stack. But as a small company that practices shipping often, we can’t ship everything feature complete from day one and thus video streaming launched with the ability to only stream from your default rear camera...

In a long lived and complex application, there often comes a time when some early decisions end up becoming constraints that are difficult or impossible to overcome. At some point in the lifespan of the software, you may be faced with a choice — do the Big Refactor, or find ways to work around the p...

Improving our original, embedded SQL generator and some related scripts by converting them to a better, long term, stand alone SQL producer that’s faster, more reliable, and more obvious. About seventeen years ago, in 2019, I published my blog post “Let me automate that for you” about a design for a...

An overview of off-the-shelf solutions for moving data out of Kafka, problems we had making those systems work, and how we wrote our own solution and stood it up for those in a similar situation. You cannot know everything a system will be used for when you start: it is only at the end of its life y...

At GameChanger, we use scripts in many of our flows such as during deploys or running Ansible while booting new instances. Some of these flows are critical to our operations and require good visibility. Traditionally we tried to send both metrics and logs to DataDog where we can both monitor what sc...

Why Dependency Injection In any large object oriented codebase, managing dependencies can get difficult. Each class can require any number of third parties or other classes to function, and it can be hard to test the behavior of a single class with mocks if those dependencies aren’t easy to provide....

At GameChanger, being able to deploy our changes quickly and reliably has always been important. Over the past few months on the platform team, we’ve been working to build a simpler and more reliable deployment pipeline to support our product teams in shipping code with speed and reliability. In thi...

An overview of what AWS ECS is, how to run Apache Airflow and tasks on it for eased infrastructure maintenance, and what we’ve encountered so that you have an easier time getting up and running. Our data team recently made the transition in workflow systems from Jenkins to Apache Airflow. Airflow wa...

Redshift. It can store insane amounts of data. It can also store insane amounts of surprises, considerations, new ideas to learn, skewed tables to fix, distributions to get in line, what’s a WLM, what am I doing‽ This post is meant to give you a crash course into working with Redshift, to get you of...

Intro GameChanger’s Team Manager is built on top of a Node.js API server. Although we’ve had a lot of monitoring and logging throughout it’s lifetime, most of our metrics were at an aggregate level. By alerting on symptoms, it was easy to spot that something was broken, but not necessarily what or w...

You’ve finally got everything working in your staging environment: the new systems talk to each other, everything is running smoothly, your dashboards are beautiful and pristine. Now you need to get it into production with zero down time and no interruptions. And then you realize, you’ve no idea wha...

Preface Before we begin, I suggest settling in. Unlike my previous post, this one won’t be short. It’ll also be more technical, though I will do my best to link to resources in case you get lost along the way. So my suggestion is get a nice cuppa, turn off notifications, and brace yourself: We’re go...

As GameChanger’s data engineer, I oversee the data pipeline and data warehouse. Sounds simple, right? And at a high level, it is! Fig 1.1: high level architecture diagram. Some complexity removed due to it being kinda boring for this post. Producers produce into the pipeline, and our main consumer i...

Riding the wave of change Old habits die hard. We’re creatures of habit, and provided there’s no stimuli that causes us to change and evolve, we’ll all very likely stay static. After all the more you repeat something, the better you get at it, and there’s little to be gained from change for change’s...

Have you ever participated in a firefight where the root cause seems unclear, then suddenly the symptoms self-resolve? Sometimes inadvertent action may cause it, other times it appears miraculous. If you find yourself in this situation, or excusing recovery with “it was a one-off blip,” your system ...

In the first part to this two part article, I talked about the motivation and preparation behind creating and running this activity. Here, I will talk about the setup of the activity itself and the aftermath and feedback we got from it. The Activity We allotted two hours for the activity and broke i...

You may have been in a meeting where you see one person constantly get steamrolled, notice one person repeatedly interrupting others, or observe someone feeling uncomfortable to speak up. Although we have, in many ways, grown accustomed to these behaviors and the biases that cause them, they can unf...

Up until the latter half of last year, we, the QA team at GameChanger, dedicated many hours to manually running regression tests on our apps. We found ourselves caught in a time crunch before weekly releases, falling behind in testing new features, and struggling to maintain a high standard of quali...

I have been developing Android apps in Java for years. I recently joined GameChanger and was excited to learn that GameChanger is using Kotlin. I originally thought that moving to Kotlin would be as simple as learning some new syntax, but I discovered that there was more to it. After a brief learnin...

Introduction In my last article I talked about the sync system for our new GC Team Manager app and the trade-offs we considered in our design process. To reiterate, the high-level structure we settled on was a backend Pub/Sub service, with small granular updates, and we needed to account for the lac...

Introduction GameChanger recently released an all new app, GC Team Manager. This wonderful new product helps youth sports communities communicate, coordinate, and organize their team’s lives. I have been lucky enough to be on the team that gets to build the backend for this new app. Throughout build...

I work as a software engineer at a sports tech company and I am a woman. These facts about my life are why I continue to be distressed about the news of the Google Memo, written by software engineer James Damore, and its ramifications for my industry. While the headlines may make the memo seem like ...

I’ve been working on a new project recently, and when I say new, I mean brand new. This isn’t just a lateral shift on the team to get my hands dirty in a new area of focus. Nor is it even adding a new product to our existing stack. This is building a brand new backend API for a brand new app. I’m re...

Some of the most difficult issues to avoid or debug when you first start building iOS applications are those dealing with view layout and content. Often, these issues happen because of misconceptions about when view updates actually occur. Understanding how and when a view updates requires a deeper ...