3 ms·

I work at The Players’ Tribune, leading a small team of engineers, and I never thought I’d see one of our articles on the front page of HN. Our mission is conn

I work at The Players’ Tribune, leading a small team of engineers, and I never thought I’d see one of our articles on the front page of HN. Our mission is connecting fans and athletes, and our long-form articles do a great job of that. We’re also exploring how technology can create even deeper connections and more compelling experiences. Would love to hear thoughts on this from the HN crowd.

goatherders 8y ago
Is there a good way to contact you? Or maybe email me (addy in profile)? Would love to drop you a line on exactly what you are asking - deeper connections through tech with the folks that enjoy TPT. Regardless, keep up the great work. I'm a big fan.
- wildermuthn 8y ago
  Would love to talk more, and have some projects in-progress that will need beta-users. nwildermuth at playerstribune.com
  - goatherders 8y ago
    Sent
- avip 8y ago
  Ask HN “Beta testers for players tribune?” Will likely fill your quota.
dorchadas 8y ago
If you could incorporate a reading of this, by Darius (and Quentin for his parts), that'd be amazing. I'd love to not only see the athletes write long-form articles about themselves, but to hear them talk about it. I feel like there's just so much more emotion that comes through, even when they do write in a colloquial style like this one, which does showcase a lot of emotion.
- wildermuthn 8y ago
  Thanks! There’s been some conjecture about Alexa and narrating articles. I think it is definitely worth an experiment. You’re right about the emotional connection being an essential element. We’ve ramped up our video production over the last year, and I’m intrigued by the possibilities of live-streaming video. Especially as an ongoing conversation following up on an initial article. I’m curious if opening up a dialogue between an athlete and readers would be more (or less) emotionally engaging, and what forms would work best.
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  I think the script for an audio version would probably be a different piece altogether. Although, as an avid podcast listener, I'd probably be very into it.
dopeboy 8y ago
You work at a fascinating place. I'm a big basketball guy and PT articles routinely make it into r/nba. In a world of content farms, I really appreciate the good writing you all put out. What sort of tech stack do y'all run? Any interesting / unique tech challenges you get to face?
- wildermuthn 8y ago
  I came onboard last year, and at that time we had a vanilla Wordpress stack that had been worked on by various contractors over the years. The layered codebase was hard to maintain and extend, so we did some surgery to replace the FE with Next.js, React, and GraphQL. On the BE we kept Wordpress, but put it behind a GraphQL API that stitches in both WP content and other data from other services. I have no love for Wordpress, but we have a lot of legacy data and the admin GUI is what our company is used to. So we kept it. However, our use of a stitched GraphQL api enables us to move functionality out of WP into other services. Small example: articles often include the social media handles of the athlete. This data is stored, managed, and served from another system. The stitched GraphQL schema has been a real benefit to us. One API to rule them all. Otherwise we’re on Google Cloud, use Fastly for caching Next.js SSR content, and manage deployments with Kubernetes (managed GKE, nothing fancy). It might come across as over-engineered, but our system is simple, solid, performant, extensible, and insert-more-buzz-words. If it sounds interesting, we are expanding the team and would love to hear from people!
  - hobolord 8y ago
    do you have any blog posts or writing about the graphql stitching part, mostly curious about the architecture? I've just recently started looking at and using graphql and your usage of it seems pretty neat. It seems like it's allowed you to keep business requirements of the WP GUI but given a lot more freedom in terms of API extension
rdiddly 8y ago
Honestly I find this way more interesting than watching an actual game. I'm not a sports fan whatsoever. But relating to this guy as a human being, hearing his story, I mean it seems like anybody can find something interesting about that. I've always been more of a scholar than an athlete, and my only thing outside of that was music. I can name who played bass for what band during which years and albums so forth, but not who played small forward for the Clippers. I had to look all that shit up. Actually that's an interesting note too - this article had an interesting side effect of spurring me to go over to Wikipedia to look up noob shit like where have I heard this name Darius Miles before? (Turns out it was from his stint in Portland.) And what's a small forward? And then off on tangents... what are the other four positions, and who are some famous players in those positions, and what's a "pick" and what's the "post" and what's a "triangle offense" and all kinds of stuff. I learned more about basketball today than in many preceding years.

goatherders 8y ago

Is there a good way to contact you? Or maybe email me (addy in profile)? Would love to drop you a line on exactly what you are asking - deeper connections through tech with the folks that enjoy TPT. Regardless, keep up the great work. I'm a big fan.

wildermuthn 8y ago
Would love to talk more, and have some projects in-progress that will need beta-users. nwildermuth at playerstribune.com
- goatherders 8y ago
  Sent
avip 8y ago
Ask HN “Beta testers for players tribune?” Will likely fill your quota.

dorchadas 8y ago

If you could incorporate a reading of this, by Darius (and Quentin for his parts), that'd be amazing. I'd love to not only see the athletes write long-form articles about themselves, but to hear them talk about it. I feel like there's just so much more emotion that comes through, even when they do write in a colloquial style like this one, which does showcase a lot of emotion.

wildermuthn 8y ago
Thanks! There’s been some conjecture about Alexa and narrating articles. I think it is definitely worth an experiment. You’re right about the emotional connection being an essential element. We’ve ramped up our video production over the last year, and I’m intrigued by the possibilities of live-streaming video. Especially as an ongoing conversation following up on an initial article. I’m curious if opening up a dialogue between an athlete and readers would be more (or less) emotionally engaging, and what forms would work best.
acjohnson55 8y ago
I think the script for an audio version would probably be a different piece altogether. Although, as an avid podcast listener, I'd probably be very into it.

dopeboy 8y ago

You work at a fascinating place. I'm a big basketball guy and PT articles routinely make it into r/nba. In a world of content farms, I really appreciate the good writing you all put out. What sort of tech stack do y'all run? Any interesting / unique tech challenges you get to face?

wildermuthn 8y ago
I came onboard last year, and at that time we had a vanilla Wordpress stack that had been worked on by various contractors over the years. The layered codebase was hard to maintain and extend, so we did some surgery to replace the FE with Next.js, React, and GraphQL. On the BE we kept Wordpress, but put it behind a GraphQL API that stitches in both WP content and other data from other services. I have no love for Wordpress, but we have a lot of legacy data and the admin GUI is what our company is used to. So we kept it. However, our use of a stitched GraphQL api enables us to move functionality out of WP into other services. Small example: articles often include the social media handles of the athlete. This data is stored, managed, and served from another system. The stitched GraphQL schema has been a real benefit to us. One API to rule them all. Otherwise we’re on Google Cloud, use Fastly for caching Next.js SSR content, and manage deployments with Kubernetes (managed GKE, nothing fancy). It might come across as over-engineered, but our system is simple, solid, performant, extensible, and insert-more-buzz-words. If it sounds interesting, we are expanding the team and would love to hear from people!
- hobolord 8y ago
  do you have any blog posts or writing about the graphql stitching part, mostly curious about the architecture? I've just recently started looking at and using graphql and your usage of it seems pretty neat. It seems like it's allowed you to keep business requirements of the WP GUI but given a lot more freedom in terms of API extension

rdiddly 8y ago

Honestly I find this way more interesting than watching an actual game. I'm not a sports fan whatsoever. But relating to this guy as a human being, hearing his story, I mean it seems like anybody can find something interesting about that. I've always been more of a scholar than an athlete, and my only thing outside of that was music. I can name who played bass for what band during which years and albums so forth, but not who played small forward for the Clippers. I had to look all that shit up. Actually that's an interesting note too - this article had an interesting side effect of spurring me to go over to Wikipedia to look up noob shit like where have I heard this name Darius Miles before? (Turns out it was from his stint in Portland.) And what's a small forward? And then off on tangents... what are the other four positions, and who are some famous players in those positions, and what's a "pick" and what's the "post" and what's a "triangle offense" and all kinds of stuff. I learned more about basketball today than in many preceding years.