gitball

Overview

gitball is an R-based engineering pipeline and data platform for a fantasy football game with a unique twist: players interact with the game by performing git-like actions. The project leverages R for data ingestion, transformation, and database population, and uses real football data to power the fantasy experience.

Key Features

• Fantasy Football with Git Actions: Players' in-game actions (such as transfers, trades, or strategy changes) are modeled as git operations (commits, branches, merges, etc.), creating a novel and collaborative gameplay experience.
• Automated Data Pipeline: R scripts fetch, normalize, and populate football data (leagues, teams, players, fixtures, events, stats) from the API-Football service into an Azure SQL database.
• Modern Data Engineering: Utilizes best practices in R for reproducibility, modularity, and robust data handling.
• Cloud-Ready: Designed for integration with cloud databases and scalable workflows.

Components

• setup_database.R: Creates and initializes the normalized database schema.
• git_init.R: Populates all tables with up-to-date football data from API-Football.
• git_load.R: Additional data loading and processing utilities.

Getting Started

1. Clone the repository.
2. Set up your .Renv file with the required API keys and database credentials.
3. Run setup_database.R to initialize the schema.
4. Run git_init.R to populate the database.

Inspiration

This project is inspired by the intersection of software engineering (git workflows) and the world of fantasy football, aiming to create a collaborative, data-driven, and fun gaming experience for engineers and football fans alike.