Hall of Stats

Today I’m very excited to make two announcements.

The Hall of Stats is Open Source

On this project, I’ve been lucky to work with two of the most talented developers I’ve ever known—Jeffrey Chupp and Michael Berkowitz. I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve produced together and I’ve enjoyed sharing it with all of you. Luckily, Jeffrey and Michael are just as interested in sharing their contributions to the Hall of Stats.

Today, the Hall of Stats is officially open sourced on GitHub.

What does that mean?

A lot of work goes into making a web app—even a relatively small and focused one like the Hall of Stats. By open sourcing, we’re sharing the entire process—every piece of code we pushed and when we did it. Want to see how we did the bar graphs on player pages? It’s all there. Want to know what techniques we’re using to make the site run so well on an iPhone? Take a peek. How about the sweet player linking and data embedding we have on bios and articles? Just look. The rake task that generates player rankings—or similarity scores? I know you want to see that.

Want to play with the code? Just fork the project and start started.

But there’s one more thing we’re making available…

CSV Data Download

One of the most popular requests we’ve received is data downloads. Basically, people want a way to take the Hall of Stats data and play with it on their own. Well, today we whipped a big batch of the secret sauce and started canning it. You can now download player stats in a CSV.

As I tweak the formula, I’ll always be sure to update the CSV file. This will be easy because that’s how I populated the database (from the CSV file). The latest CSV will always be accessible from this article or the The Tech section of the About page.

If you come up with something cool with either the source code or the data, be sure to share it with us. Okay? Have fun!