Gone Foosin’

One part of my life that I haven’t mentioned here is foosball.

My first exposure to foosball was when I started working at BI in 2005. Initially, I viewed foosball (table soccer) as a pretty stupid game, but I did start playing a bit. It was interesting to see the differences in skill level between good players and neophytes, and I decided I’d start cultivating my skills. Despite the rather mundane nature of the game, there are a lot of subtle skills one can develop, and it’s really quite interesting, once one actually gets into it.

When I moved to Optaros, I found they, too had a foosball table, and I started putting real effort into on developing my game. I also took over most of the maintenance of the table.

At the same time, I missed one of the features we had at BI. Our lead architect had begun keeping track of scores and developed a ranking system based on the same system used to rank chess players. It grew into a full-fledged .NET application, and people really took to it. I decided I’d bring “the foosball app” to Optaros.

Unfortunately, when I asked the guys where the source code was, no one could answer me. So I wound up having to study the Elo ranking system and reverse engineer the thing all over again, this time using Perl and MySQL. I called it “Frank”: Foosball Rank. I took the opportunity to tweak the UI a bit, and you can see the result here. Neeto features include charts of each player’s rating over time, and the ability to predict the score of any given matchup, based on the players’ ratings.

The cool thing is that people at work have taken to it pretty well. At first, I was entering all the scores myself, but people have caught on, and now it seems pretty self-sustaining. It made for a fun little project, and the level of competition has definitely gone up since the system went into production back in June. I guess if I was smart I’d put some advertising on that page and generate some revenue from it, but that’s not gonna happen.

But the foos—and the foos app—are definitely interesting additions that I’m enjoying.