If last week was about laying foundations, this week was about building on them — across five active projects spanning new product research, greenfield development, enterprise e-commerce, client IT infrastructure, and even a bit of community volunteering.
The biggest strategic development this week was the kick-off of a brand-new internal project: a quantitative sports analytics platform. This is an ambitious, multi-phase product that will combine statistical modelling with exchange API integration to identify value opportunities in football markets. We completed a substantial block of foundational research — evaluating football data sources and APIs (comparing coverage, update frequency, and data richness across multiple providers), deep-diving into the academic theory behind Poisson modelling and the Dixon-Coles adjustment for low-scoring match outcomes, and investigating the tax, legal, and exchange policy implications of operating such a system as a UK limited company. We also completed the infrastructure and architecture research spike, proving out hosting, CI/CD, and solution architecture decisions so the implementation tickets could be written with confidence rather than guesswork.
Off the back of that research, we scaffolded the solution — a .NET 10 / C# 14 codebase using Clean/Onion Architecture — and completed the full setup of the core domain models. The hosting environment evaluation is now in progress, with Azure Container Apps emerging from the research as the target platform. A CONTRIBUTING.md and housekeeping pass ensured all technical documentation reflects the confirmed .NET/C# stack rather than earlier TypeScript/Node.js exploration. The CI/CD pipeline setup is queued and ready to go.
On the family history web application, the CI/CD pipeline story remains in progress with several remaining subtasks — domain registration and DNS configuration, SSL/TLS provisioning, secrets management, and a smoke-test deployment to validate the end-to-end pipeline. The hosting and database provisioning work also continues, with Azure App Service, Azure SQL (with spatial data types), and Blob Storage all in the process of being stood up in the UK South region.
The e-commerce client engagement saw another productive sprint. We completed the remaining payment method mapping configuration changes across all environments, deployed further integration bridge global config updates, verified those config changes were working correctly in the live pipeline, reviewed a colleague’s pull request on a related egress bridge service, and updated the internal incident ticket with a full post-mortem of what happened. Regression testing of the goods-in application against the UAT environment with warehouse involvement is currently in progress — the kind of thorough, cross-functional validation that gives confidence before a production release.
On the client IT infrastructure side, we completed a security report for a client’s infrastructure and resolved a SharePoint account-switching investigation. There are a few items in the pipeline too — speccing out an automated X-ray-to-SharePoint upload workflow, setting up an additional website admin user, and updating business listing opening hours ahead of the May bank holiday.
And finally, on the community front, we made progress on a treasurer handover for a local organisation — initial contact established, with a follow-up call to arrange.
All in all, a week of serious breadth and depth: fourteen items shipped to Done across five projects, three more actively in progress, and a new product initiative moved from zero to researched, architected, and scaffolded in a single week. Not a bad return.