Hey everyone

Once a week, I post an update to the forum outlining what I've been working on that week.

I started this back in July because most of the things myself and Miklos (the other member of the development team) work on are fairly chunky tasks that take a while to complete, and I'm conscious that it can be a while before you all see the fruits of any of that labour, and we get lots of questions about how the latest software release is coming along.

We know from surveying you that some people are just here for the software and don't really use the forum, so I thought I would start sending these updates via email as well for your benefit. I definitely encourage you to use the forum though and get involved in the discussion - you have nothing to lose and everything to gain!

This update and all previous ones can be found here. Feel free to ask questions by posting a reply on that thread or just by responding to this email.

This week's update:

Footy Software

I did some work on the UI this week. Because the football strategies are much more complex, it makes the strategy builder look a lot "busier" and I've tidied it up a bit to make it cleaner and clearer. I'll apply the same updates to the horse racing software in the coming weeks too.

Lots more work on the back-end strategy "engine" this week too. I'll give some techy details on this for anyone who's interested, otherwise this basically amounts to "still working on it".

Every time we make a change, we have to re-test a ton of cases that we already tested, because it can have a knock-on effect, and we're constantly trying out new ways to make the queries run faster. We use an SQL database and there are often multiple ways to achieve the same thing when writing SQL queries.

In an ideal world, the query optimisers built in to these products would make all versions of a query perform the same way. Kind of like saying that "3 x 3 + 1" is the same as "5 x 2" because ultimately they both equal "10", and it should be equally fast to calculate the result both ways. It never works that way though! We've just been playing around with some price rank queries and a relatively minor change reduced a query execution time from 20 seconds to 0.5 seconds.

Imagine that difference multiplied by however many rules you have in your strategy and you'll understand how important these optimisations are! There will come a point when we just have to say "good enough for now" and unleash it and keep making improvements once it's passed the beta stage but we're not quite there yet.

Horse racing software

Draw bias strategy rules are ready to go. I've identified another whopping 22 strategy rules that I want to add, and will do so ASAP, so block off some time in your diaries to play with those 🙂

I've also nearly finished some big enhancements to the group breakdown feature. Will try and get all of these released this week.

BTC Bot

As most of you know, we have a project on the go where we try and convert all of Ryan's trading to an automated setup using a bot of our own design.

A bit of a cockup by myself this week meant I had to rebuild the server we're running this on. Basically I created a second partition on the disk, forgetting that this isn't supported on OnApp, which is the platform the VM is on. Whoops! Thank goodness for backups.

Fortunately this happened when the bot was off while we wait for Ryan's live Betfair API key, so he's none the wiser (shhh!).

That's it for now.

Adam