Trying to Figure Out Sakkari’s Next Game… Sort Of
So, I got this idea a while back, thinking about tennis, specifically Maria Sakkari’s upcoming matches. Not really about predicting winners, more like trying to build a little something, maybe a small tracker or analysis tool, just for fun, you know? Sounded simple enough.
First thing, I started poking around. Needed data, right? Looked for recent match results, player stats, maybe surfaces, that kind of stuff. Found a few public sources, some cleaner than others. Spent a good chunk of time just trying to pull it all together, clean it up. Used some basic Python scripts, nothing fancy, just grabbing text and numbers.
Then I thought, okay, how do I display this? Maybe a simple web page. This is where things started getting… messy. We had this small internal project going on at the time, completely unrelated, but management decided my “Sakkari tracker” could be a good test case for some new tools they wanted everyone to try.
Suddenly, it wasn’t just my little side thing anymore. One guy insisted we use Go for the backend because he’d read an article about it. He barely knew Go, mind you. Another wanted to use MongoDB because it’s “flexible,” even though our data was pretty structured. And the frontend? Oh boy. We had someone who swore by Angular, another pushing for Vue, and a third who basically just knew jQuery but pretended it was modern JavaScript.
It became a total mess.
- We spent weeks arguing about frameworks we barely understood.
- The simple data fetching became complex API endpoints nobody agreed on.
- My initial goal – just looking at Sakkari’s game – was completely lost.
We ended up with this weird Frankenstein setup. The backend was half Go, half Python scripts duct-taped together. The database choice changed twice. The frontend was a bizarre mix of components from different libraries that barely worked together. It looked awful and ran slower than me after climbing a flight of stairs.
Why did it happen? Because nobody actually cared about the original idea. It was all about pushing their preferred tech or following some management buzzword. We had endless meetings, drew diagrams on whiteboards, wrote documents nobody read. It felt like playing office politics instead of building something.
I remember one specific week where we argued for three straight days about logging formats. Logging! For a tool that was basically supposed to show a few stats. It was ridiculous. By the time we sort of cobbled something together, everyone had lost interest, and the project just fizzled out. The data was outdated, Sakkari had played like five more matches, and the whole thing was pointless.
So, yeah, that’s my story about “Sakkari’s next game.” It started as a simple idea and ended up as a lesson in how not to run a tech project. Sometimes, just keeping it simple and doing it yourself is way better than getting tangled up in team nonsense and buzzwords. Never did figure out much about her game patterns, but I sure learned a lot about messy tech stacks and pointless meetings.
