14meters fencing blog

Again, its been a while since I’ve had time to specifically work on the 14m site itself.  But, I wanted to shoot out a quick update on what things are happening and what the plans are.

First, as some people probably know already, I’ve been spending some time trying to help the FOC push out an online referee exam and learning system.  I ceded priority to this project, as it actually has big, positive implications for changing the refereeing system and processes.

Next, I’ve decided to put the journal on the backburner for now. Its a good idea whose time will come, but the best functionality that I have planned for it won’t happen until askFred gets certain functionality implemented, and that is an unknown.  So until that ball gets rolling, I’m pausing production.

In its place, I’m going to begin working soon on a referee-based utility.  It seems to me that there are a lot of problems finding and arranging referees, and I’m looking to help solve them.  I’m looking to build something to help hook refs with tournament organizers.  This includes smart estimation of travel costs, from tanks of gas to analyzing flight data to help optimize costs when searching for good referees.

In addition, on the side, I’m going to look into developing an open source, modular scoring machine.  The intent is to start with the bare-bones scoring box.  Being open source, you’d be able to buy all the parts and download the software on your own to build something for cheaper if you’re tech savvy enough, but if you aren’t, the goal is to try and price it below $100 for retail.  Software would be updatable with a USB cable and a computer, and the intent would be to develop other modules that you can hook into the base box to upgrade into a better product.

Thoughts?  Input?

Although I’ve not posted any good updates to the site lately, I just wanted to make sure to let everyone know that progress is being made.  Journal is closer to done.  Test has been incrementally improved.  And there are other things in the works that are related, but that I haven’t yet specifically mentioned.  I’ve been putting most of my effort into these secret projects, so things just look slower than they really are.

I took some time and greatly improved the referee practice test.  There’s a lot more flexibility and options available, although random is still truly random.

Previously, http://test.14meters.com went to the collaborative referee test.  I decided to co-opt it for other purposes.  Now, http://test.14meters.com contains the most up-to-date version of the code that I’m willing to release to the public.  It is most likely full of bugs, but if you want to see where I’m going with things, you’ll find it there.  Once I feel I’ve achieved a stable release, I’ll copy it over to http://14meters.com and people can start to actually use things.

Just wanted to keep people up to date with the process.  Expect more frequent blog posts about what I’m trying to do now that I have some free time to work on things.

So, I’m in the middle of developing something for fun, but I realize that I want to also release this to the public-at-large.  

I’m (slowly) building an online fencing journal applicaiton.  The point of it would to compliment and perhaps eventually replace the standard paper-based fencing journal.   The intent is to build something that will work as an analytic/statistics tool, as well as a lookup tool.

With respect to statistics and analytics, I feel that the biggest shortcoming with your standard journal is that you have to sit down and analyze the notes yourself to produce meaningful results.  Its fairly easy to do mental justifications about trends and therefore discard or twist the results of the analysis.  Instead, if you can plug in the raw facts into an application and have it spit out graphs, data and objective conclusions, it becomes easier to objectively critique your own fencing.

With respect to lookup, I don’t intend on building a big, universal fencer database.  That would be excessive, offputting, and a little intrusive, I believe.  The intent would be for someone to be able to search their own notes, information, and experiences against a specific fencer via a mobile application.  Just an easy way to access all of your past notes, do a search on a fencer you’re about to fence, and see the culmination of how they’ve fenced you in the past.  It would give you better insight into what you’ve done wrong, or what they’ve done right with respect to fencing you in the past.

Anyone have any thoughts/suggestions/etc.?