Building great software is a complex art. It takes a blend of understanding the problem, creating an innovative solution, leveraging advanced technology, and being able to build a complex system based on code. It does not just happen. You can’t just outsource it to some consulting company. It takes the right blend of people to do it right.
Our ambitions for RaceDay Scoring are very high. We want to not only build the next generation of The Race Director. We also want to build the next generation open platform for any timer. Allowing timers to use any hardware, score any race, integrate with any registration or results system.
The team was in Moorestown this week. Bob took this great picture of the team that is building Race Day Scoring. From the far right:
Matt Avery – is the Product Manager for Race Day Scoring. He joined RunSignup in 2015 from Yellow Jacket Racing where he was their lead timer. He has been helping timers at RunSignUp the past 3 years with all sorts of questions – typically on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning :-). He is really driving the overall project and designing the user experience for timers. His computer science degree is coming in handy, and he has learned React so he is doing some of the UI development directly himself as well (yes, everyone on the team is contributing code).
Roger Bradshaw – was the original developer for The Race Director. This software has been in use for over 28 years. In 2017, timers used it to score over 20,000 races and 8.7 Million participants. Over those years Roger has continuously updated the software and understands the many needs of timers. He is excited about the Race Day Scoring project because some of the design decisions he made years ago still affect the ease of use and functionality today since it would be too hard to change. He is also excited about getting on a new generation of technology. He is developing code that does the export from The Race Director to RaceDay Scoring so races can be easily migrated and dual-scored. He is also integrating the RaceDay Scoring middleware that connects to all chip systems directly into The Race Director for production level use this year.
Michael Chisolm – started as a a part time intern with the RaceJoy team in Orlando. He has been full time the past couple of years helping to develop the RaceJoy Monitoring system, as well as doing a lot of Android and iOS development. He has written the filtering layer – between the raw chip data coming in and deciding what data will be used to score the race. He will be expanding his responsibilities into the application layer over the course of this year as well as continuing to move RaceJoy forward.
Stephen Sigwart – is the primary architect and core developer of the scoring software. He is also the RunSignup CTO. He will slowly transition the project over to James and Michael over the coming months as he moves more of his time back to the core RunSignup engine. He still has several pieces to finish off this year before we ship the production version of the product late in the year, including Teams, RunSignup Results refactoring and api, and the distributed computing aspects of transferring scoring responsibility between a timer in the field and a home office head timer.
James Harris – is the creator of RaceJoy and has recently taken the overall development lead for our RaceDay technology platform. He is a gifted developer and development team leader with a wide software development and management background. The past 5 years he has dedicated to RaceJoy where he has created the industry leading innovator for GPS tracking and race day social engagement. As part of his RaceJoy experience, he has worked with practically every different timing system. He has written our Connector software that is the middleware we use to connect with all of the different chip systems. We have implemented and tested with ChronoTrack, MyLaps, Race Result, RFID, IPICO File and Elite, Trident File and Direct, File and a RunSignup Open Protocol. He will be taking Stephen’s place as the lead architect over the course of the year.
As you can see, we are in great hands. Experience, depth of development skills, and a proven ability to deliver quality, market leading software.
The Beta will be here in the next couple of weeks. And this team has done an outstanding job getting there!