In my first year with Golf Canada in 2021, having just gotten comfortable with the organization’s incredible dataset on golf being played in Canada, I pitched the obvious: Why don’t we spin up a large number of servers in the cloud, crunch through the data and gift each member of Golf Canada with their own shareable graphic of the golf they played that year? The go-ahead was quickly given and a furious three week effort resulted in the 2021 #MyGolfYear campaign, a simple but well-received surprise to Golf Canada members.

In 2022 and 2023, with more time for planning and exploration, the #MyGolfYear campaign returned, with the basic summary values such as the Total Rounds, # of Holes, Distance Played and Best Round again being featured, and now adding 15 possible ‘achievements’ a golfer could earn due to their play that year.

For technology, #MyGolfYear is powered by Laravel Horizon running on Amazon AWS Cloud as a fast, parallelized queue to process the millions of scores entered annually by hundreds of thousands of Golf Canada’s membership, with MailChimp and Mandrill used for e-mail and OneSignal for push notifications to provide members with their annual stats package.

With an e-mail open rate in excess of 64% and thousands of shareable graphics making the rounds on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, #MyGolfYear had popular success, but added commercial success via sponsorship with JOURNIE Rewards in 2022 and BDO Canada in 2023 and onwards. To me, like Spotify Wrapped, it is the definition of making use of an organization’s existing assets in a new (heavily ‘inspired by’) way to surprise-and-delight one’s own customers while also creating a saleable new asset.

With over 125,000 golfers using the Golf Canada Mobile App on a weekly basis, Golf Canada had a very successful app that was nonetheless severely limited in its ability to surface messaging and communicate with the userbase of the product. To provide a reason for Canadians to open and use the app outside of strictly recording their scores and increase engagement with their friends, Golf Canada and its partners, I proposed in 2022 that social network-style features be implemented in the next release of the Golf Canada Mobile App.

In late 2022 and early 2023, I architected and led the development of the friend system, home screen news feed, the ability to attach photos and videos to a score posting or content upload, and push / e-mail notifications about your friends’ activities in the Golf Canada Mobile App. The API and backend in use is Laravel, with Laravel Horizon utilized in particular as a fast, parallelized queue to create cached score and content posts that can be instantly retrieved and displayed in the home screen feed of golfers. To notify golfers about friend requests and the activities of their friends, Laravel Horizon queues and executes 1:1 transactional push notifications via OneSignal and e-mail via Mandrill. Finally, Voyager provides Golf Canada staff with a simple-to-use web backend to administer and moderate content on the platform.

Since release in August 2023 through the month of December, over 9.8 million posts have already been viewed via the home screen feed, 136,000+ new friend requests have been made and accepted, and over 30,000+ photos and videos have been uploaded via the mobile app. Critically for Golf Canada’s partners, a 400% increase in banner ad code loads and a 300% increase in ad impressions has resulted from the introduction of the home screen news feed to the app.

With mobile app development partner Mirego on board, I led this project internally at Golf Canada, soliciting and organizing requirements, architecting and developing a Laravel-based API and backend to drive content, data, images and video to the mobile app, interfacing with and implementing integrations with the PGA (ShotLink) and the LPGA (R2IT) for real-time leaderboards and tee times, Ticketmaster for mobile ticketing, VenueNext for mobile ordering of food and beverages, Intellitix for RFID wristbands, and Trak-4 to enable real-time player positioning display in the mobile app.

During the two weeks of the live tournaments, the Golf Canada Mobile App was utilized by over 17,000 event attendees, and $65,000 CAD in incremental revenue was generated via mobile ordering of F&B. The Laravel-based backend is dynamic and can be utilized in future years to display and run further tournaments without the need for further development efforts or even technical ability.

With Vestaboard having documented an API to create software around, I got to work on what I thought would be the most obvious and useful integration: Real-time updates from the National Football League (NFL), National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League of Baseball (MLB) and National Hockey League (NFL). With those first four sports “installables” completed, I took on a contractor role with Vestaboard and completed a Stock Market (NYSE/NASDAQ), Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar and Spotify integration shortly before my own physical Vestaboard arrived in Toronto, Canada in April, 2021.

Starting in January 2022, the work I began with those first Installables now powers Vestaboard+, a subscription service for Vestaboard customers that’s expanded to 54 unique integrations that includes Sonos, Apple Music, weather reports, Cryptocurrencies, custom time clocks and even a build-it-yourself message set scheduler. Vestaboard+ runs on a Laravel 8.x platform utilizing Laravel Horizon, with each Installable scheduled to scan for time matches and fire a message to a Vestaboard when a match occurs.

By the offseason between 2017 and 2018, we’d had enough experience with operating the site and undertook a full rebuild, with the main goal of making the site easy to turn over each year by simply making use of the WordPress Customizer interface, the Events Calendar plug-in and page templates for early in the year, mid-year and the time period in which the event calendar for the festival is partially or fully known. Finally, a standard website operating manual was creating and was provided each year to the new host team along with a screenshare tutorial on major site features.

In 2018, I undertook a rebuild and migration of the CFL Pick ‘Em website to Laravel 5.x in order to improve the site stability, bring the codebase in line with existing internal CFL standards (PHP and MySQL-based whenever possible) and generally improve the website’s featureset. One major goal was to provide updated leaderboard rankings and scores within seconds of each game’s conclusion; Laravel Horizon as a queue/job processing solution makes this possible, with the Amazon Aurora database scaling automatically ramped up as any game enters its 4th quarter.

• Develop a parent WordPress theme containing a home page, article (post) and video template, and generic page template
• Create child WordPress themes that, using SASS variables, swap in team logos and colours in all the appropriate places
• Develop a WordPress plug-in that automatically retrieves data from the CFL API to make the Schedule Page, Standings Page, Stats Page and Player Profile templates available and kept up-to-date
• Implement a website backend that allows for managing data for a CFL Draft, player profiles, custom landing pages and other league-specific features

After the initial MVP was launched in November 2015, a full-time staff of 3 web developers were hired on in the league office in Toronto, Canada and continued to deploy new site features incrementally in weekly development sprints.

• Implement a new, simplified website layout to explain the product’s features and pricing options
• Convert the site to the WordPress content management system, allowing all text displayed on all pages to be editable by GameCentre LIVE staff when copy changes are required
• Improve the usability of the product by introducing a Schedule page with direct links to begin watching games, including a Game Of The Day highlight feature
• Add a Support section that was highly flexible in the content that could be placed within it, with a search feature to allow customers to quickly find answers to their questions

Despite managing one of the largest teams of WordPress developers in North America, I try to not automatically jump to the assumption of WordPress being the best choice to be the basis of a new website. Initially, we considered use of Webhook and other similar static page generators, but our more complex site requirements (single sign-on with NHL.com, data retrieval from the Sportsnet Stats API) nixed that.

Ultimately, we made the decision to go with building a WordPress site where all page content right down to section heads and button text could be modified in the site’s backend. Use of WordPress also allowed us to use top-notch plug-ins such as Polylang, Redirection and Yoast SEO, which all come together  as extremely user-friendly tools to allow non-technical staff to efficiently administrate to the website.

I led the technical architecture of the website, bringing in Eric Parlier on contract as lead developer, Brian Skene as design lead and Godwine Lee doing QA duties for the site. The site was launched successfully and on time, and has quickly became what we were hoping it would be: More than just marketing materials for the product, but actually also the primary method for how users of the product find live games and replays to watch, simplifying that process for a great many people.

Compared to the efforts of our peers in Network, our job in IT was relatively straightforward: Implement a secure authentication portal that could scale instantly to the levels required in the Rogers Centre (seating capacity: 54,000) with integration with Cisco. I worked closely with a typically small and nimble team of lead developer Jonathan Bouganim (Sr. Developer) and David Sedgwick (Manager, Quality Assurance) to drive the solution live well in advance of our project deadline.

I attended the home opener of the Blue Jays on April 13, 2015 as part of the team monitoring the deployment in its first mass-scale usage by the public. The project was a complete success, with over 20,000 visitors connecting and making use of the wi-fi simultaneously. Many attendees of the game expressed their pleasure via social media:

https://twitter.com/fabthebrand/status/587791447753121793

https://twitter.com/trishfoto/status/587744116575961088