Inspiration
At some point of my life I started to travel a lot, but wherever I went, it was quite difficult to find people to play soccer. I wanted to practice my coding skills at the same time than doing something awesome, so I started this project. This was about 10 years ago.
What it does
Is a platform to connect footballers worldwide. It allows you to find other players in your city, create footballe matches, invite people, create and joing soccer teams, check venues and request reservations.
How I built it
I started many years ago with PHPNuke, but then I changed to Joomla. Right now the backend is fully built in joomla but some new parts are starting to come in Java using the Spring Framework.
When I saw that Facebook opened the Messenger API I started to work in its integration.
Integrating with Facebook Messenger has helped my to improve the code quality quite a bit.
Challenges I ran into
My code is quite organic, so no real planning behind it. I just have been trying and learning so far under PHP.
When the moment for the bot arrived, my code was completly not up to the task. All the views and the models where mixed up in my custom code, so was quite bad.
Slowly, the Facebook Messenger Bot encouraged me to improve all my code, be much more microservice oriented and separate very carefully all my MVC components. The resuts make me very happy.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
The bot works! That makes me real proud. Still, I would love to have more users but I think I have been to shy about the project. Moreover, the UX is not the best possible, so I am trying to improe to make it as easy as possible.
What I learned
Code quality is king!
What's next for footballMatch.co
I want to make stronger integration wth the paid venues so the users not only request reservations, but actually pay for their reservations with the venues.
I want to improve the referee's module so they can receive payments via the platform too.
Moreover, I want to enable priviledge access to talent scouts so there we become a safe and neutral platform for showcasing soccer talent, and who knows, perhaps help footballers to kick start their professional carreers.
Finally, I want to make it easy for sponsors to help footballers, teams, championships and even matches to get more resources and become better and better.
The road is still long and quite exciting!
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