Introducing fastbreak

Fastbreak is a dashboard that highlights advanced sports statistics across multiple leagues. I built it to be fast, free, and interactive. This early development version accomplishes those goals, and I've been using it daily for a few weeks now.

Take a look at the user guide and help me beta test it today:

Beyond these core goals, fastbreak has several other focal points:

Conversation starter

I want an app that gives me the tools to facilitate and expand sports conversations. Fastbreak can be a gateway to deeper, more informed, stat driven conversations about sports amongst fans.

Fast and free

Fastbreak delivers sports information to any device as quickly as possible, without ads or cost. We already deliver a lot of information and we're planning on adding much more. As fastbreak grows, speed will always be a paramount priority. I'll write more technical blog posts about fastbreak's architecture, but the high-level approach for this first iteration is to lean heavily on statically generated content delivered via CDN.

Interactivity and simplicity

Fastbreak is full of interactivity so you can manipulate the data and charts on the dashboard. But almost as important as interactivity is simplicity. Fastbreak should be easy to use and understand. We want more people talking about advanced analytics, so the tools need to be accessible to beginners.

Cross platform and mobile first

To reach as many users as possible, fastbreak is committed to being available on the most popular platforms. The initial version includes a web dashboard and native iOS and Android applications. There are many layers to achieving true cross-platform development with maximum code sharing; fastbreak makes trade-offs at certain layers but remains committed to those three platforms. How we build cross-platform applications will be a major technical topic for future dev logs.

Offline first architecture

When I use a mobile app, I don't want it to be non-functional if I lose internet connection. Fastbreak does not need an internet connection after you download the charts when first opening the native mobile apps. Updates obviously need an internet connection, but the native iOS and Android apps are built to download all the latest data and cache it until the next update.

Source available and contributors welcome

Fastbreak isn't technically open source since you can't take the code and make a profit off of it, but I am building it in public on GitHub. I would love to have people contribute code, charts, ideas, and critical feedback.

Future

I want to grow fastbreak into a community driven project that uses open source R packages and ethical web scraping to bring advanced sports analytics to as many people as possible. Immediate roadmap plans include:

• Weekly trends for teams
• Charts for MLB entering spring training
• Filtering and sorting chart data

Join the community

I'd love to hear your feedback and ideas! Join the Discord server to chat with other users, share feature requests, or just talk sports.