Monitoring data for badmington and volleyball during the 2012 Olympics
Twelve months ago, there were three of us in the new Olympic Data Team: product manager Oliver Bartlett, developer David Norris, and I, David Rogers, as technical lead. We were tasked with providing data for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s Olympics 2012 project: stats, events, results...
Today, we are a team of 20, we have built five applications, provide 174 endpoints, manage 50 message queues and support ten separate ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Olympic products - from the sport website to the Interactive Video Player.
Over the course of the games, we expect to process over four million messages, such as athlete profiles, diving events from the Aquatic Centre or the latest medal table for Team GB. Throughout the project, there have been two distinct, but closely-linked objectives.
Two Objectives
Firstly, we needed to build a high-throughput, low message processing system, making sure the facts and figures emerging from the Olympic venues were available, throughout the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, quickly and accurately.
Secondly, we wanted this data to be part of a wider story, ensuring the wealth of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ content, such as news, blogs, galleries, video and live commentary could be seen alongside the live data, and presented to suit a range of audiences. This second objective is best exemplified by the 10,490 athlete pages on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ sport website, each offering a dynamic and meaningful aggregation of content, all based around an individual Olympian.
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