Q&A: Bruno Tavares CTO & Co-Founder at RealFevr
As the CTO at RealFevr can you tell us a bit more about your role there?
RealFevr is a company that delivers a universe of digital and real-time fantasy sports games.
In a context where the main product is strongly supported by technology, the role of a CTO, which is typically managing the entire technological ecosystem, often crosses over to business domains because the two are so tightly bound.
My main goal is to ensure the alignment between the technology we use, both development and maintenance of the product (or products) and the experience that RealFevr provides to its users. It’s a goal that is shared by the development process of our products and also in the day-to-day operation of our platform and current user base, which requires a closely managed and well planned infrastructure. This alignment is also key throughout the product life-cycle; from the UI/UX, to the development cycle, operation and maintenance of the platform.
This process adheres to the technical opportunities that our product development area identifies, its design and development by the engineering team according to the technological roadmap, and its post-development management by the operations teams.
We want to have a cycle of rapid development but also ensure that we take careful steps, and that we do not have to go back to the drawing board due to shortcuts we’ve made.
Another process that we actively manage is the intake of new technology. Sometimes new technologies (or developments of existing technologies) bring us innovative functionalities or even huge performance boosts to parts of our engine. It is important for us to be aware of technological innovations happening in the areas that are relevant to us. This process is a long running cycle of being aware of what is being done in these communities, evaluating new solutions, and bringing those that help us into the RealFevr ecosystem.
Altogether, we end up managing a continuous cycle between the conceptual design of the platform and the technological ecosystem that we are constantly monitoring, evaluating, and studying.
This focus on continuous product evolution requires us to keep a close eye on all of the infrastructure that supports us as a company. We are a company that has a real-time product and therefore it is also a priority for us to continuously plan and manage the entire infrastructure that ends up providing the game experience to our users.
Most of our business goals are closely related to the user experience that our platform delivers. To reach them we must carefully plan our infrastructure, continually measure performance, and have strategies to correct any issues that arise that impact the user experience.
Can you tell us about the challenges faced by including real-time sports statistics in RealFevr?
The challenge with delivering a “real-time” experience is both simple in definition but also rather hard to accomplish; The user must consistently perceive the information provided by the system as “live” when compared to the real world that he is observing.
This is especially hard when you’re moving around, processing and transforming a huge volume of data. These tasks take time, and it’s time that adds up to a possible perception of delay by the end user.
To keep this delay to a minimum, the system must be highly efficient during every step of data manipulation and delivery. We can break it down into 3 very generic phases: 1) data acquisition, 2) data processing, and 3) delivery of information to the user.
The aim of data acquisition is basically to collect data as close to the source as possible (to keep acquisition errors to a minimum) and as soon as possible (to keep the latency to a minimum). In the case of sports, the data is collected by human observation, which introduces an immediate delay between the event and the “fact” being digitally produced. Although this represents a handicap for a “real-time” chain, until everything that happens in the scope of a sport event is measured digitally, this delay is unavoidable. In this model we know that we have the best partners in the market to produce this information, so our challenge is to make sure that our platform is always available to process the data with the lowest possible latency.
In the data processing phase the challenge lies on the amount of data and on the amount of transformations that we need apply to it. We process about 10,000 events per game, all of them with context (eg: an event has to be related to everything that happened before in that game). Each one of these “events” needs to be transformed to feed the fantasy realm almost immediately. For RealFevr, this step is especially critical because this information is used by the user to make decisions (eg: if he should replace a player) and also for the system to define what are in fact possible / allowed actions (eg: if he can replace the player). Besides speed, it is very critical to do all of this processing without any errors since it will directly impact the outcome of the game.
Lastly, delivering this information to the user brings a completely different set of challenges: Enable the user to explore this information in the most practical way (different segments, rollups, etc.) and that the information is contextually correct for each user (who has his / her unique team, composed of their individual choice of players).
So, having 10 soccer matches simultaneously in progress around the globe with 500,000 users acting on it; yes, it’s a real challenge to flawlessly deliver that real-time experience.
The strategy we use to tackle this challenge is to decouple and isolate the components of this data streaming and processing pipeline. Each component has a very specific purpose in the pipeline and no component is strictly bound to each other, so that they communicate through a high level messaging framework. This allow us to evolve and optimize each component separately and even experiment swapping them by substitutes that we think might have better performance. With this architecture, we’re currently meeting our goal of delivering a real-time fantasy platform experience, but we are constantly evaluating and fine-tuning our engine as we grow in number of users, in volume of data acquired, and in the competitions that we are supporting.
Are there any specific platform updates planned for 2018 you can discuss?
Yes! The RealFevr platform is just in the early stages of our ultimate vision and concept. We aim to be a one-stop-shop for fantasy sports. Up until now we’ve been developing what can be seen as a framework for fantasy sports. For the last couple of years we´ve been designing the application and the backend systems that support it, while keeping in mind that we should design it scalable and agile enough to support our future plans for the company. From now on, the goal is to build on top of this framework to expand the feature set, the sports available, and the fantasy models supported. We already have multiple competitions and multiple game models.
We want to continuously align to this concept of a fantasy hub so, in the 2018 roadmap, we will continue to expand in the competitions we support, but we also plan on introducing new game models and new sports.
The ultimate goal is that any sports fan can find their favorite combination of competition, game model and sport available at RealFevr to play. We have a long way to go, but adding the support for new game models and new sports are huge steps toward our goals.
We are also working with sports analytics that will add a layer of statistics to all of the raw data that we’ve been collecting. The main goal is to provide this data to our users so that they can freely explore and use it to aid their decision making.
So in short, we have big plans in store for 2018 and a long roadmap of ideas to help us build an even more exciting RealFevr platform going forward. We think you’ll like what we have coming.
To learn more about Bruno Tavares visit his profile on linkedin.
Chat with the RealFevr team on Telegram
Stay Connected
ICO Website: https://www.realfevr.io
Notícias em Português: https://medium.com/realfevrico-brazil
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RealFevr_ICO
Telegram: https://t.me/RealFevrICO
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/RealFevrICO
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/realfevrTV
