Why a Tabroom.com Newsletter?

We are starting this newsletter to help you all, as Tabroom.com users, keep more up to date with what we’re working on now, what we’ve changed, and where the platform is going. I have attempted such regular communications before, and definitely believe in transparency, but the waterfall of desired improvements, bugs, and infrastructure tasks can sometimes push everything else off the mental priority list. 

But there is little point in making a feature that nobody knows how to use, and it’s always better for you all to know, when the platform has a moment of struggle, why that happened and what we’re doing to prevent it. 

All coaches in Tabroom are receiving this first newsletter, but we won’t send them to you again unless you opt in to receive additional monthly updates.

Recent Changes: Web Push Notifications

The major recent alteration you might notice is that our provider of web push notifications suddenly changed how users interact with it in such a way that all the green bells turned red.

This unannounced change required me to rebuild Tabroom’s interface to it over a couple of days. I did not enjoy that, as the provider's technical documentation and functionality is subpar. However, in doing so, I learned more about the service and how it operates, and extended it in certain ways. The web alert mechanism should now be a bit more resistant to ad blockers, though Apple still imposes limitations that require iPhone/iOS devices to take multiple steps to get them working. 

Tip: You can now turn off web push alerts for all your devices in your user profile; select the Person icon on the top right corner and you can see all your login sessions. Those enabled with web push notices will have a green bell icon; select that bell to unsubscribe that device. 

Important to know: I learned that alerts will usually only be sent to one device, the last one you subscribed with. That’s because the service was really built for commercial communication: namely, spammers. Fortunately, I think I know how to bypass these limits, so you get alerts on all your devices if you want, and I will try to address that soon.

Recent Changes: Responsive Mobile Device Design

Tabroom has never looked great on mobile devices; the original box model was created before the smartphone was a thing, and sometimes that shows. One of the goals of the rewrite (more on that below) is to address that in a fundamental way. I created a mobile-icon based interface for smartphones that, while it’s not great, should be better than what came before for mobile devices.

The menu and the top bar are made into icons instead of words so they fit a small screen better. If there is a sidebar menu, it will only be visible if you use the “hamburger” menu—the three horizontal lines icon that appears at the far right. The search box is now activated by a search icon instead of taking up horizontal space on the screen.

Recent Changes: Schematic Dropdown Design

Previously, when tabbers would hover over the Schemats tab in their tournament, they would be met with a daunting list of acronyms in a single row. Now, event abbreviations are grouped together in a column by event category (Congress, debate, speech). Debate events have an orange boundary that highlights different events. For example, Novice PF, JV PF, and Varsity PF will be split from LD events by an orange line. If a tournament only has events in one category, such as only speech events, the Schemats dropdown will only have one column.

Tip: Tournament administrators can override how Tabroom automatically breaks apart events at Settings > Events > Pairings. Using the "Menu Pattern" option, tournament administrators can choose a scheme like A, B, C and label events alike to ensure they are grouped together on the Schemats dropdown.

January Downtime

We had a 20-minute slowdown on Saturday, January 18, largely because I honestly forgot to expand the server resources. We run on only a few servers during the week, and then expand up to a dozen or more for Saturday’s rush. And that Saturday, we found out what happens when I don’t expand things.

I spent a lot of August making a screen that makes spinning up new resources much faster. I did run into a circular issue: that screen is itself part of Tabroom, so when Tabroom itself is slow, so too is that screen. Fortunately, I found a way around that and had things back about 10 minutes after I sat down. And then I spent a couple days writing a better and faster way to bypass this issue in the future.

Now, it’s someone’s job to check on server expansion each Friday. More importantly, the work I put in building that bypass can be used to automate the scaling process. We haven’t had good data on the proper ratio of tournament size to server count before; this downtime actually gave us that. Automating the process so it no longer relies on my own personal, imperfect memory is now on my medium-term horizon.

Progress on the Tabroom.com Rewrite

I’m spending most of my time on rewriting Tabroom in a new software stack. I’ve been working on infrastructure that is going to keep me honest and code quality high. Partly, this is through the use of automatic tests that can tell me if I changed something in X part of the code that ended up accidentally breaking Y. Part of it enforces consistent formatting in code, which sounds petty and pedantic—and often is!—but can have a dramatic impact on the quality and maintenance of code. If the “right” code always looks the same way, certain types of incorrect code really stand out, the way a couple of Chinese characters would jump off the page if included in a page of Italian prose.

I’ve also built nearly a complete page. That sounds really small and simple. It is not. There’s a lot of different features, links, and elements in a Tabroom page, and most of those things are shared between every Tabroom page. Therefore making the first Tabroom page in an entirely new stack can take months of code—and that’s person-months, not calendar months—since I spend a ton of my time keeping the gears of the current site turning. But once you’ve made that first page, the second page should take a few hours. The third page might take 30 minutes. The fourth page might take 10. And so on.

A boy can dream, anyway. Until then, I hope your next tournament runs smoothly and well.