A few days lighter than usual — some illness and weekend commitments — but not completely idle. I was able to push a few features forward on projects over the weekend without much active intervention, which is its own kind of useful data point about how far along these projects are.

Reaching parity with an existing Riftbound fan site

Today’s main focus was doing a proper feature analysis against another Riftbound fan site to understand what parity actually looks like. It’s a useful exercise because it forces the question of what data you actually need versus what you’re currently pulling, and the answer here is: more than I have.

To replicate the feature set I’m looking at, I’ll need the full history of match data stored locally. The alternative — making a large number of live requests — isn’t viable for a hobbyist project where I’m watching costs. That makes this the first time I’ve had to think seriously about data architecture for this project: how to store it, how to keep it updated, and how to do both cheaply. I don’t have those answers yet, but framing it as an architecture problem rather than a scraping problem feels like the right starting point.

Finding easy tournaments

One feature I did ship today: a way to identify “easy” Riftbound competitions by looking at a store’s history of prior events and predicting how competitive the next one is likely to be based on past attendance. Low attendance historically tends to mean a smaller, less competitive field.

It’s low signal by design — stores can only run these tournaments once per quarter, so there isn’t much data per location to work with. But some signal is better than none, and it’s a feature that actually changes how you’d decide which events to travel to. The longer-term version of this couples tournament difficulty with individual ELO ratings calculated from full match history, which would give a much sharper picture. That’s further out and depends on getting the match data architecture right first.

Still frustrated with Codex

I haven’t gone back to Codex since the rough session earlier in the week. The tool invocation problems made it more hindrance than help, and I haven’t had a good reason to fight through the setup again. I’m planning to try building some real flows with it tomorrow and see if a more structured approach changes the experience.