My son Fenix plays baseball and swims. This site has been recording it — game by game, meet by meet — for years. The tagline on the front page is “Watch me grow,” which is the whole brief.
What is on it
- Baseball — EKIS Baseball across 7th and 8th grade, and the El Paso Seminoles 10U team: results, playoff runs, and batting, fielding and pitching stats
- Swimming — Sea Dragon Swimming meet results and championship records
- Post per event, dated and archived, going back to February 2024
- A visitor counter, because he likes seeing the number go up
Why it is built on WordPress
This is the entry on the shelf that is deliberately not custom, and it is here for that reason rather than in spite of it.
I could have built it. Given what else is on this site, that would have been the easy choice and the wrong one. What this project actually needed was:
- To still be running in five years without me maintaining a framework
- To let someone who is not me post a game result from a phone in a parking lot
- To cost almost nothing
- To never lose the archive
WordPress with an off-the-shelf sports theme does all four. It is Grace Themes’ free Sports League theme and the WPS Visitor Counter plugin, and I have written approximately zero lines of code for it.
The engineering judgment here was recognising that the interesting problem was not the software. It was the operations: the domain and DNS, the hosting, the backups, keeping the platform and plugins patched, and continuing to care about all of that for years after the novelty wore off. A custom build would have made every one of those harder and the site no better.
What it actually demonstrates
Most portfolio projects are demos that were interesting for a fortnight. This one has been quietly serving real content to real people — grandparents, mostly — across multiple seasons, through platform updates and DNS changes, without going down or losing an archive.
Choosing boring technology and then operating it properly is a large part of what I did professionally as a solution architect. This is the smallest possible version of that, and the one with the longest track record.