Intermediate Coding with Fantasy Football: A Project Based Guide

Intermediate Coding with Fantasy Football: A Project Based Guide — available at fantasycoding.com/next — is a follow up to Learn to Code with Fantasy Football I wrote mostly over the Summer of 2020.

It walks readers (who it assumes already know basic Python and Pandas) through building three projects:

All of these projects are built around the Fantasy Math API, access to which is included in the package (also includes access to the GUI version of Fantasy Math too).

While the reactions to Learn to Code with Fantasy Football have been positive and many people have built cool things after reading it, I had heard from a few people that they weren't quite sure where to go or what to do next.

In particular LTCWFF didn't go that in depth on the process of developing real life programs. I figured this was an opportunity to do that.

All three projects are built around GraphQL API access to the newly rebuilt (in PyMC3) Fantasy Math model, which I continue to believe is underrated.

I figured this was an opportunity to expose LTCWFF readers to the Fantasy Math model, possibly even one they'd be willing to purchase annually.

Reception among people who have bought it has been good, there just haven't been as many buyers as I'd have liked.

One issue is that LTCWFF is pretty comprehensive, and a few former readers I reached out to about this follow up already considered themselves intermediate and were lukewarm about the idea ("sounds cool, I'll probably buy it if it's not too expensive"). So I think it's likely most of an issue of market.

Overall, I'd say this ended up being not worth my time to do, but there were some positives. For one, I ended up hosting the GraphQL API myself (on a DigitalOcean box) and learned a decent amount about hosting, deploying and dev op type stuff from doing that.

And now that it's done, it shouldn't be that hard to spin up in future years if I decide to do that.