Rate the game

What is this

This is a work-in-progress web app for rating sports events.

Imagine you weren't able to watch last night's match/game/race and you're wondering if it's worth watching it today. But you have no one to ask, and you don't want to google it to see any spoilers, so what do you do?

This site helps you with that. It allows users to vote if a match/race/game was worth watching or not, without any written comments so you can be pretty sure not to spoil the experience by seeing its outcome.

Current project status (looking for collaborators)

I started this project on my own, but I'm looking to share it with anyone who might be interested. I set up some basic stuff like initial database tables, CRUD wiring for sports/events/votes and auth setup. However, there's a lot more to do and I'm looking for people who can help with following:

branding - "Rate the game" is the best name I could think of, but we really need a better one. Something like "Is it worth watching" would be better
insights on how you'd want to use this app - I know F1 and UFC fans sometimes watch replays the day after if they missed the original run, but not sure if it's like that for other sports. Also, can this rating system maybe be used for other stuff apart from sports?
design work - there's no design whatsoever in the app now, looking for any help possible (wireframes, color schemes, anything). It's currently looking ugly af
recommendation engine - the system should be able to track what the user likes, and then recommend sports events that might be interesting (and well rated) to them, and then push them that notification through email
really advanced - mine some data from other sports websites with more analytics/stats, correlate it with our scores, then use that to extrapolate the scores for old games, or maybe even predict it for the upcoming ones

Tech setup

views are generated server-side using our custom TypeScript-based templating engine, plain old CSS for styling, no JS at all at the moment
Typescript + NodeJS on backend, exposing both JSON API endpoints and regular server-side rendered HTML pages
PostgreSQL as a database, using Sequelize as ORM, but with database-first approach
database migrations are done with npm run db-migrate command, which executes all newly added scripts and regenerates needed TS classes

Caching

We have simple in-memory caching setup with our custom cache.service.ts class. However, due to app having to do some mild number crunching while calculating event scores, we're caching not only plain database results, but rather entire constructed domain models. This will be performant, but we need to be careful about the following:

as cache is shared between all users, we should never store any references to currently logged in user in domain model. Search getVoteBelongingToUser for example how to handle such cases.
since domain models are aggregates of many database models, we will need to invalidate the caches more often than usual. For example, if some event.model.ts changes, we should invalidate it, but also its parent entities which can contain it (like sport.model.ts in this case). This might get complicated in the future (for example, if sport name changes, we should also invalidate all cached events belonging to it). For now our setup is pretty simple so it's not a problem, but if it proves to be, we should revert to caching of only database calls
as we're not sure if this will work fine, we've added AppSettings.isCacheEnabled to be able to turn it off in runtime if needed

How to run the app

checkout code
create a Postgres role/database
copy .env.template file into .env, change POSTGRES_URL to your database
run npm install
run npm run db-migrate to make sure your DB is up-to-date
run npm start to run the app, or npm run dev to run a live-reload dev server

Deploying it on server

app is set up to use pm2 on server and can be started by running pm2 start npm --name ratethegame -- start
demo is deployed here: http://ratethegame.supercollider.hr/

mbrizic / ratethegame