Fortunately we still have the passion, but unfortunately, our time has dried up.

We won’t be running Season 2 this year. Instead, Troy and I will be spinning off the software we wrote to manage the first season, and working on that to the point where it’s a viable product in and of itself. Our new tournament as a service will be called BattleStack - and we’re very excited to be working on it.

The Team would like to thank everyone who had input into Season 1, and our pre-season. Thank you to our sponsors, our game admins and the teams, you, our players. In particular, we want to thank the great folk at Bigpipe and Playtech. Without your support, our LAN Final would never have happened. Your support is what made it all work.

Thank you.

The awesomeness that was Season 1 is a perfect example of what all you likeminded people can do when you come together. We aim to make that ‘coming together’ scale.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

Alex

team@battlestack.io

So without Further ado, here’s what we’re running at the moment.

I’ll go through our components technology by technology:

Most importantly, Docker

We couldn’t do what we wanted to do with Overtime’s CI / CD without docker. Initially I created docker-compose containers for instances of Docker Registry, Nginx, and MongoDB and our Web App. The plan was to containerise those components because it would allow us to scale up instances of our web app and MongoDB in case our load got crazy high. An ambitious design requirement, but much better for the long run. In fact nearly every design decision we’ve made technologically has been focused on “What will make our lives easier in the long term”. We do this voluntarily so making money immediately and as quickly as possible isn’t such a huge issue for us! It’s nice.

We had a bunch of technical issues with Nginx not liking being containerised and not linking to our other containers properly. That resulted in us shifting it to the VPS itself and using it for reverse proxy and routing, it’s working pretty nicely so far.

We run separate production and test environments. Local builds are automatically built and dockerised on commit, are automatically deployed to our test environment with 0 loss of service. When we’re ready to go to prod, we just retag the docker image in question as prod rather than test. Docker picks up that there is a new image available and redeploys in the same way as our test environment, meaning we also get 0 down time. We still plan our deployment windows for early in the morning just in case something breaks but the process seems pretty solid so far.

Our Web App

Overtime uses a Java 8 back end with an Angular front end. Once the application is complete, players will be able to register themselves and their teams, sign up for tournaments, track points, rankings tables identities, and communicate with organisers and other teams. We have a dedicated slack team for overtime and we’re planning on our players being automatically enrolled into slack on sign up. I also want the enrollment process to add them in to relevant channels (they might get a private team channel and enrollment into open game and interest channels) - but we’re still thinking about how that would work!

We’re using MongoDB because we really like it’s object paradigm, it’ll make it easier for us to manage our data long term.

Speaking of building:

We use Bamboo for our CI/CD work, initially we used Jenkins but found it unreliable, prone to random failures and difficult to set up, maintain and extend. Bamboo is a much more user friendly solution. We had set up our build server as an additional docker container on the first VPS but thinking about it, we wanted to ensure that development work could never impact production environments. Because of the size of our VPS it was possible that our build container could cause production issues by hogging up resources while building things. An edge case but with the focus on the long term we decided on separating that out on to it’s own VPS with its own resources.

Project Management

We use Taiga.io for project management. It has the option for sprint or kanban set ups, it’s a hosted solution and it’s free, which fits our budget! Taiga is also open source which means that we can take it, self-host and extend it should we ever need to provided we comply with the licence, which is another bonus.

Wrap Up

That’s all the detail I’ll go in to for now. I hope this helped you, if you want any more detail or you’d like help with your own projects, let me know, I’d love to see how I can help!

The past month has been crazy.

In the past month, I’ve started a new role, my son has started crawling, I’ve helped launch the second season of Overtime on a brand new technical stack, they only thing that hasn’t changed is this blog, I’ve been neglecting it. Work has slowed down a bit before christmas, so now seems like a good time to post an update.

Leaving Spark Ventures

I left Spark Ventures after working there for a year. They supported me in the first full time role as a software developer that I’ve ever had, I’m extremely grateful for the opportunities they gave me, and I’ll miss the team and the work. I left on great terms and (if it’s in the cards) I look forward to returning in a more senior role. Before I left, my team was working on continuous integration and deployment. We successfully transitioned Bigpipe from a completely manual deployment process to an automatic one. It was a really enjoyable task, and once it was complete, I wanted to keep doing that kind of work.

Enter Healthlink, stage left.

I was made aware of an opportunity at Healthlink to continue doing work like the work I did for Bigpipe. The situation here at healthlink makes the Bigpipe automation simple! Healthlink runs a product that enables health practitioners to send documents - referrals, letters, medical certificates, test results and so on - digitally between providers. It’s the reason that you can get a non-funded drug approved by Pharmac in three days rather than three weeks. It’s behind your rural doctor getting results back from that specialist lab in the big city as soon as the results are done - without having to wait for the rural post service to deliver the mail.

It’s an complex system of java applications, web servers, auth servers, databases and APIs that have got loads of tightly coupled moving parts. I’m helping them work through that system with a view to achieving CI/CD - completing this process will hopefully reduce the degree of coupling, consolidate technologies and generally refresh the tech too. It’s the biggest job I’ve ever attempted, and I’m glad that I’ll be working alongside some incredibly clever people - all of whom will be able to teach me a great deal.

Overtime Season 2

Overtime season 2 has launched!

We’ve completely rebuilt out tech stack! There’ll be another post coming with the specifics on what we did and how we did it, as well as some challenges we had to overcome. We’re looking at returning to the NZ eSports scene bigger and better then ever before, and I think we’ll start to see some traction this season. We’re more organised, more experienced and have better technologies behind us. The team is expanding - more people working on more things mean we can just do.. more!

Watch that space, season 2 is going to be excellent!

Toby has started crawling!

I’m pretty proud of that little guy. He’s ahead of schedule for all of his developmental milestones, he was born on the wrong end of the scales for average head size, body size, body weight and a bunch of other stuff. At 8 months old, he’s now in the 97th percentile for head size (aka big ol’ brain) and is above the average for his other growth indicators. My wife is doing a great job being a mum while I have to leave for work every day. I’m very proud of them both.

Things are looking pretty positive.

I’m in the proess of writing a whole bunch of posts, and will be hopefully publishing a bit over christmas. TTYL. Beer to drink.