Spring Cleaning 2022
It was a dark and stormy night…
Then the STRATZ Supdate was released and the world was lit anew with brightness and splendor! ☀️
This week, while we position ourselves to work towards more big updates, we’ve taken some time to chisel away at some much needed housekeeping. While it’s common for us to brush aside our less glamorous updates to talk about the biggest and most obvious changes, today we’ve decided to celebrate a few of the smaller ones.
First up on our list today is new stats for translations! Now, when you go to change your language settings, you’ll find that the list is sorted by which languages we have the most coverage for. Hovering over any of these will reveal where we currently stand.
We’ve also kept many of the languages that we would like to provide support for, but have yet to find contributors for. Someday competitive gamers from all around the world will feel at home on STRATZ!
Also this week, we’ve made some decent progress in a process we began a long time ago — completing a full transition to our new codebase. We’ve worked through some very major updates over the years, including a massive rewrite that began shortly after Blukai was unleashed upon the world of STRATZ.
Since that process began, most of our time has been invested in growth and refinement, while some parts of the site have continued to be deployed from our previous builds. Some of the most noteworthy of these pages that are still online include the Hero Overview pages, the Match Playback and Farm pages, and many of the Leaderboards around the site.
To help move forward with removing the old code this week, Blukai cut out the old filters that were lingering on your Player Matches pages and replaced them with our current solution. While most of these were available previously, the new filters offer faster access and greater visibility into your options and what you’ve set, allow you to share links with filters applied, and conform with the filters you’ll find elsewhere on STRATZ.com.
We also added a new Time filter, which you may have used elsewhere on the site, to let you look at any batch of matches from any period of your Dota career.
In addition to the filter upgrades, Blukai also modernized the infinite scroll implementation, along with the render path itself, allowing for the performance and responsiveness to be doubled on these pages!
Finally, these tables were a bit long in the tooth from a design perspective, so we touched them up a little bit to bring them more in line with our current table standards.
All of the updates we made to your Player Matches pages have also been applied to your Guilds Leaderboard page. In addition, we also added support for filtering Guilds by language, as requested from our new Discord user, smùdskù. Now you can find top Guilds with people you can communicate with, all over the world!
Another set of both smaller and larger changes that have been taking place behind the scenes for quite awhile now have been brought to you by STRATZ’s newest team member, P1! P1 joined us late last year and, after getting up to speed with the STRATZ way of building product, has been grinding through lots of smaller projects. Many of these have been updates to existing content that wasn’t especially obvious visually, though he’s also the man behind such beauties as the Team / Players page, most of the new Search page updates, the new Highlight Bar, part of the new Player / Hero / Stats page, and many other pieces of new content.
While he’s been plugging away at making your Dota life more handsome and interesting, he’s also now nearly completed rewriting a huge portion of our components library into typescript; one of the final pieces of our updated frontend system that has yet to be fully transitioned from javascript. And we can’t wait to show you a few bigger projects of his that are very close to being unveiled!
To finish up for today, let’s take a look at his most recent work — a seemingly small but super useful upgrade that he made to how your Search results are ordered. Elasticsearch can be quite tricky to get just right when it comes to delivering the results you want from a dataset as diverse as those you can find in Dota, which can result in some odd sorting results, like searching “Ame” and seeing him listed as the 7th Pro Player in your results, instead of the first.
Beginning today, you should find that the search is much better at delivering results to you in the order that you want!
Enjoy keeping up with what’s happening at STRATZ? Follow us on Medium, Twitter, or Facebook to get notifications of our latest Supdates! If you want to get more involved, join us on Discord!
Did you miss our last Supdate? Behold, the thrilling finale of your Match Overview saga!
See you soon!
