Intelligent Cricket

About Intelligent Cricket

Intelligent Cricket combines the latest in machine learning, simulation and statistical analysis with data gathered from a global team of scouts across the globe to enable the teams to know themselves better, but more importantly, to know their opponents even more.

By working with expert developers, statisticians, professional cricketers, performance analysts, and many, many other cricket experts they provide a variety of services, based on what the team needs. From performance analytics, tournament support, commentary data for teams, and more, to fantasy cricket and cricket game simulations for the audience, Intelligent Cricket has a variety of products a true fan of cricket will love.

Our collaboration

Tilde Loop has been selected to build for Intelligent Cricket a brand new service for a special event that rolls in only once a year – the annual Indian Premier League player auction.

We were also initially tasked with the design, to lighten the initial load on Intelligent Cricket’s designer.

Undaunted by the task, we set out to research the ideal technology stack for this kind of application in the timeline that was set.

The service needed to display a large amount of tabular data have multiple pages that will group the data based on the topic and teams, and be able to update the data shown at high frequency throughout the event.

For frontend development React, a JavaScript library was chosen, together with MaterialUI for the styling of certain elements.

Backend development and storing information in a database, however, was only briefly considered, but ultimately not implemented due to time constraints.

Instead, in agreement with Intelligent Cricket, the data was stored on Google Drive in a Google Sheet format for two reasons:

1. Collaboration – people who have access have the ability to use it at the same time and see what the other person is doing as well
2. Sheets API – Google’s powerful Sheets API allows developers to connect to a Google Sheet and receive data from it in JSON format without needing to format anything. Mapping the data is still something that needs to be done, as the API cannot possibly know what is supposed to be in each cell, so knowing what cells contain which data is paramount

With that being agreed on, the focus shifted on authentication and where to deploy the service.

In the end, Google’s Firebase was chosen, as it provides user access generation, authentication as well as website deployment together with GitHub pipelines for automatic deploys.

With all those things decided on, development and implementation were quickly done, leaving plenty of room for testing and styling adjustments before the main event.

With the event being completed smoothly, code was documented and showcased to Intelligent Cricket’s development team, highlighting the most important features and file structure.

While our time with Intelligent Cricket was short, it was filled with excitement and discovery of new ways of implementation as well as new features of already known technologies.

And we are sure that Intelligent Cricket will continue to share their features and services with the world of cricket, Tilde Loop will continue to discover new ways of using already existing technologies.