Draft Slot

The original version was two repos, both dated early 2019. The API was Laravel 6 with Lighthouse GraphQL and Passport for OAuth. The frontend was React 16 with Apollo Client for data and Redux for local UI state, bundled with a hand-rolled Webpack config.

I picked every piece for a reason: GraphQL was new, Apollo was new, and picking them meant I'd learn them. That was the entire point of a thesis project.

• Laravel 6 + Lighthouse GraphQL on the backend
• React 16 + Apollo + Redux on the frontend
• Laravel Passport for OAuth2
• Hand-rolled Webpack config — no create-react-app
• Minimal tests, no deployment pipeline, no users

It delivered the thesis. It did not deliver a product. I submitted the work, graduated, and the repos went quiet for almost two years.

When I came back to it, I didn't port the old code. I rebuilt the whole thing in a single Laravel monolith with Blade templates, Alpine.js for interactivity, and Tailwind for styling. The GraphQL layer was gone. The SPA was gone.

The choice looked unfashionable on paper. In practice, it was the only one that made sense. I had no team, no budget, no investors, and a full-time job. Every hour I spent tuning a bundler or fighting hydration was an hour I wasn't spending on features my users could actually see.

• Laravel + Blade for server-rendered HTML, no hydration tax
• Alpine.js progressively enhances specific components
• Tailwind keeps CSS out of the critical path
• One repo, one deploy, one mental model

The tradeoff was real. I gave up some of the polish a proper SPA offers. What I got back was velocity. Shipping something on a Sunday night became normal again.

The hardest part of a draft prediction game is the draft itself. On draft night, every user is watching the same board and every pick needs to reach every connected browser in seconds.

I layered the real-time system in pieces. Laravel Reverb handles WebSocket broadcasting over public channels named after the draft (draft.nfl.2026). Laravel Echo on the client subscribes. Each pick is a broadcast event. The client-side store keeps only the last 50 picks in memory — the UI doesn't need more — which keeps long drafts light on mobile.

• Laravel Reverb for WebSocket broadcasting
• Laravel Echo client with public channels per draft
• ESPN API polling as the source of truth
• Admin CSV override when the feed lags or breaks
• 50-pick memory cap in the live store

There's an override system too. When the feed goes quiet — and it has, on several draft nights — I can upload a CSV and the scoring engine replays from there. The live experience stays intact even when the upstream doesn't.

A side project is easy to treat like a side project. I've tried to do the opposite — you can see it in small things like the scoring panel above, polished down to the last cell. The plumbing that users never see is the plumbing that determines whether this thing survives.

• 347 Pest feature and unit tests covering auth, rooms, entries, scoring, and notifications
• 24 Vitest tests on the JavaScript stores and offline storage
• PHPStan static analysis at a meaningful level, not level 0
• Sentry error tracking on both the Laravel and client sides
• Passkeys and TOTP for two-factor, plus Google and Apple OAuth
• Postmark with RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe and plain-text fallbacks
• A service worker, IndexedDB storage, and PWA install flow

Over 1,800 commits and 115 database migrations, each one small and boring. That's the shape of a codebase someone has actually lived with.

A draft game has a brutal traffic shape. Most of the year, nobody is here. For a few days in April, July, October, and June, everyone is. Running at peak capacity year-round would eat the budget. Running too cold would break the nights that matter.

I encoded the calendar into the deployment itself. The Vapor config has three scaling profiles — offseason, pre-draft, and draft week — and I switch between them as the season approaches:

• Offseason: zero warm Lambdas, scheduler every 15 minutes
• Pre-draft: two warm instances, scheduler every five minutes
• Draft week: 10 warm instances, scheduler every minute

Sponsored rooms carry some of that cost now — brands funding prize pools inside the app — but the seasonal scaling is what keeps the fixed side sane on a personal budget. It's the kind of cost optimization a small company would do for real money. For me, it's what keeps this project inside the budget of a personal side project.