Web Developer

I joined Turner Sports New Media in 2006 and started on PlayOn Sports from day one — Turner’s startup-inside-a-media-giant for long-tail live sports. My first desk was in the CNN Center downtown, just outside the Headline News group and Robin Meade’s office; later we moved to the Techwood campus, where the really nice amenities live. After years of do-everything work at the University of Georgia, Turner was a different world — the recurring thought was “oh, we have people for that.” No more designing my own site changes in Photoshop; there were rows of creative folks for that.

PlayOn, take one

PlayOn covered sports big enough to draw an audience but too small for a 53-foot production trailer — partnering with Raycom Media for production, we carried Division-I FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) football on ACCSelect.com and live United Soccer League matches. The whole PlayOn organization was maybe 25 people, with three or four developers on my team. I worked the front-end content side: dynamic pages rendered in JSP on Tomcat, peppered with hand-rolled vanilla JavaScript and a little jQuery, plus the era’s obligatory wrestling with IE6.

Turner’s properties all ran on a custom in-house CMS that used JSP to statically publish HTML to Apache servers. I thought it was antiquated in 2009 — but it’s the same system that kept CNN.com online through 9/11, a feat few peer sites managed. It was an early lesson that boring architecture is what’s still standing when the traffic hits.

Rows of developers

When Turner divested PlayOn in 2008, I moved to the flagship: nba.com, with side work on nascar.com. My main project was video analytics for the Flash player NBA.com was rolling out for League Pass — watching live games online, still a novel idea. I built a facade wrapper around the Omniture SDK that let our developers ping engagement “heartbeats” from inside the player, tracking actual viewing time rather than page loads — genuinely new territory for video telemetry at the time. I also handled ad-slot placement inside that player for the all-access streams.

My favorite scar from that era: for the NBA All-Star Game, fans could vote for MVP, and the league insisted the form be open and anonymous. It went about how you’d expect — we selectively removed hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes originating from mainland China, and the data was so poisoned in the end that our product director simply made a gut call and informed the league who had “won.” It would not be my last encounter with anonymous internet traffic ruining something at scale.

The StayOn team

Turner’s divestiture didn’t end PlayOn overnight — there were contractual obligations to existing clients, seasons to finish out, and the few of us who remained were affectionately dubbed the “PlayOn StayOn Team.” Meanwhile, David Rudolph was out raising the financing to buy the brand and run it independently.

I liked Turner. But eighteen months on nba.com taught me something about myself: on a property with rows of developers and more content editors than I could count, I was becoming very specialized, very fast — and what I’d loved about PlayOn was the scrappy, wear-every-hat work of being expert at many things. When David’s funding landed, he hired a CTO, the CTO hired a lead engineer, and the lead engineer hired me. I was stoked.

The rest of that story — PlayOn Sports, standalone — is where it gets good.