I joined Sports Innovation Lab in the fall of 2016 as part of the founding team in Boston as CTO. In 2016, there were just four of us, but we grew to around 10 when we signed this stick a year or so later.

We wanted understand how technology drives innovation in sports. And we were going to do this through data.

Our CEO was Angela Ruggiero, a gold medalist in Ice Hockey at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano.

Previously, I led the backend team at Intrepid Pursuits, a Cambridge, MA agency that built mobile and web apps for startups. I managed a small team of four engineers and was responsible for the architecture and implementation of the backend systems in Rails.

Finding myself at Sports Innovation Lab, it was just me and I had to figure out how to deliver the tools and apps we needed. I needed a new way of thinking about bulding modern web apps, hosting, managing infrastructure, and more.

I found JAMStack and Netlify thanks to some articles Matt Biilmann published and knew I had to learn more.

Netlify was a great fit for our needs and I quickly became a fan. In fact we became one of Netlfy’s first enterprise customers and helped shape the platform to better support our needs — specifically around authentication and authorization.

They even sent us some swag for the event.

My JAMStack stack centered are where I’d store and access data. I chose Contentful for this.

I hadn’t yet jumped into Javascript, so I stuck with Ruby and used Middleman to build the site.The amount of data I was processing and number of pages generated was stressing the infrastructure I had.

In early 2018, I was building 30k pages on each deploy --- this grew to over 60k before the end of year.

Sidenote: Eventualy that’s how I got into Javascript and building apps using Netlify functions to optimize and defer content generation from build to runtime.

Our JAMStack stack incldued:

• Contentful for data storage and management
• Netlify for hosting and CI/CD
• Middleman for building the static site
• Netlify functions to optimize and defer content generation from build to runtime
• Crunchbase for company and investor data
• Clearbit for company and person data
• Algolia for search
• Imgix for image optimization
• Auth0 for authentication and authorization

As one of the first enterprise customers of Netlify, we were one of the first to use Auth0 within their authentication service.

To build the data pipeline, I relied on:

• Feedly to grab the latest news articles in sports technology
• Diffbot to do NLP extraction on articles
• Matillion and AWS Redshift for ETL
• PeriscopeData (now Sisense) to build the data warehouse and analytics
• Intercom for CRM

And this was the product and data pipeline roadmap circa 2018.

I actually got to build most of this before leaving ~ 2 years later in 2020 just before the pandemic hit.

The plan for SIL was to build a tech community hub for sports technology in Boston.

The plans for 2018 and beyond …

Sadly, this was the only year of the meetup.

We’re hiring! well, in 2019 I was able to hire an agency to build out a mobile app. More on that in another post.