COBA: A Quick Update
I want to start by saying thank you! It’s been a weird, depressing kind of year, but it’s been wonderful to have an awesome community of users and peers to see enjoying a game I’ve always loved.
It’s been a while since I’ve last written a blog post; almost a year, actually! I figured it’s time I addressed some elephants in the room, and shared with the world what I’ve done and what’s coming. I’m going to have another blog post later this weekend standing on my pandemic soap box and talking about what I’ve learned, but for now, a few updates!
Where are all those new features?
Haha! Well, about those. Something I’ve learned during this pandemic is that I don’t have an “off” switch, just enough distractions to keep me from overdoing any one thing. I bit off more than I could chew by thinking I was going to be able to manage COBA along with my other responsibilities. I’ll touch on it later, but some of my other responsibilities have taken the front seat and COBA, as a side hobby, fell to the back burner.
So, rattling down the line, here’s a list of features and where they stand:
Scorekeeping: is not coming. There are too many complications with using it that make it faster/easier to continue to use paper or spreadsheets.
Organizations: will be coming after any spring competitions are over
Automatic Event Request Form: will be live tomorrow morning!
Any kind of payment system: is likely never coming.
Are you still charging for events?
No. A little background:
When I launched COBA, it was extremely expensive because it didn’t scale, at all. To fit more than ~10 rooms at a time I needed to build complete copies of the website. It cost me almost $60 per copy, and at my peak in September I had 3 of them going.
When I built COBA-cc as a replacement, I solved a lot of the scaling problems. My one website can now host as many as 1000 rooms, and costs only $40 per month, plus $5 for every server I need to provision on the backend (~1 per 10 rooms).
I saw an opportunity to monetize COBA; it got way less expensive and difficult to operate, and the demand was there. What wasn’t was my ability to deliver. So, I’ve made the decision to put a pin on monetization, and make a gift of COBA to the masses. COBA-cc is free to use for tournaments of <20 rooms for the balance of the 2020-2021 academic year. Anything >20 rooms I will ask for $1 per room per day to cover the additional resources I’ll need to provision.
Didn’t you promise a tech blog about COBA?
I did. The problem with writing about something you built yourself is that you often assume everybody already knows how it works. I’ve written about 4 different versions of the “tech blog” explaining how it works under the hood, and each of them was way too technical, even for software-oriented people. I think the final shape its going to take if/when I finish it will be something along the lines of “Sophomore-Year Computer Science Major” with maybe a shortlist of good resources for people looking to learn.
You sound busy lately. What have you been up to?
Despite the volume of hours I throw at quiz bowl related efforts, I work full time as a Software Engineer. Around October last year I began taking on additional responsibilities within my team, and just this month I was promoted! The additional working responsibilities took up almost all of my bandwidth between November and February; I threw on some additional load around the time of IAC Nationals to release COBA-cc, but since then it’s been non-stop for my full time job. I’m also in the process of buying a house, which has eaten up any other free time I imagined I still had.
I do still have other tech projects on my horizon. Here’s what I’m most interested in working on:
Using NLP to dissect tossup questions and build a clue catalog
Training a text-to-speech engine to read quizbowl questions with high quality diction
Building a wireless buzzer system for in-person tournaments that can be operated from a laptop with bluetooth controllers
How can I help support COBA-cc?
I promise not to beg too obnoxiously, but if you want to help cover the costs of COBA, you can buy me a coffee.
Thank you always for your continued support of COBA and Slapbowl.
