Tag: Development

Blog Posts

That’s So… Randomizer

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One feature for the Stats Page that had been floating around in my mind since I started developing Version 4 was a way to get a random show that I could just queue up and listen. I finally had a couple of hours to build out the logic to add not only a randomizer for shows, but also for guests, hosts, locations and panelists. What made easy to implement across the board was being able to use MySQL/MariaDB’s RAND() function in queries. Otherwise, I would have needed to pull down a list of valid IDs for each respective table and use Python’s RNG to pick one at random. While that result in better randomization over the long run, but it would add to the processing time. I wanted it to be as quick and efficient as possible from the application point of view. The …

Blog Posts

Wait Wait Stats Page Version 4 Released!

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This year has been full of new projects surrounding the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Stats Page, including the development and release of a data access layer library, libwwdtm, developed in Python, the Wait Wait Stats API, and the Wait Wait Reports site. All three of those projects were done as a building blocks for the next big thing: version 4 of the Wait Wait Stats Page! Back in 2018, I made the decision to step away from the codebase for version 3.x of the Stats Page; which, was written in PHP and made some use of the Silex micro-framework. While it would have been feasible to continue building on top of that codebase, it would have required a significant re-write in order to meet the requirements that I had for the new version:

Blog Posts

The 1000th* Show Taping and New Wait Wait Stats Reports

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Back in March 2019, I was working with Colin Miller at Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! on a request to pull data regarding the various Wait Wait shows that have aired; especially, getting data on shows that excluded Best Of or Repeat shows. The purpose of the request would later be revealed to be trying to determine when the 1000th* original show would land on the schedule. In July, the date and the location for the taping of the 1000th* show would start to solidify. The show would be taped in Salt Lake City, Utah and on Thursday, October 24th. Why Salt Lake City? The very first time that Wait Wait was taped in front of a live audience was at Jewett Center at Westminster College in Salt Lake City back in January 2000. So, it would be apropos that Wait Wait would also …

Blog Posts

Stats API Updates: Clean Up and Panelist Bluff Statistics

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Ever since publishing the Wait Wait Stats API, I have been working on some of the technical debts that had been accruing throughout the development and release process for both the API and the underlying libwwdtm data access library. One of those items in the technical debt list was to refactor the libwwdtm modules and make the code easier to manage and maintain. Instead of having every function related to a module reside in one code file, those functions are now broken up into core, details, info and utility sub-module under each major module (guest, host, location, panelist, scorekeeper and show). Once the libwwdtm code refactor was completed, it was time to update the Stats API to make use of the refactored modules and make the code a little bit more readable. After doing a thorough set of regression and performance testing, I unleashed …

Blog Posts

Stats Page Version 3.4.0: Correcting Some Design Mistakes

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Ever since I started working on version 3.0 of the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Stats Page, one of the design decisions that I made when it came to the individual host, scorekeeper, panelist and guest pages was to use the specially encoded names in the URL. The encoding process would convert certain characters, such as a space, into their URL-encoded version, or “%20” in the case of a space. Well, looking back, that was not really the smartest way of doing it; and, ever since version 3.0 was published back in 2014, I was afraid of breaking any links that may have been created with that URL format and did not have a lot of spare time to re-design the whole thing. As months and years went by, that problem lingered in the back of my head. Fast forward to this month, where …

Blog Posts

Slight Change of Plans: Wait Wait Stats Page Version 3.3.5

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As mentioned in the last blog post about upcoming developments for the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Stats Page, version 3.4.0 would be introducing both a new set of stats and graphs. In addition, version 3.4.0 would also include the descriptions that judge and scorekeeper Bill Kurtis uses to introduce himself at the beginning of each show. Due to unforeseen complexities of feeding the queried data into the appropriate graphing functions, I will be releasing version 3.3.5 this weekend that will include Bill Kurtis’s descriptions in each of the show’s infobox.