Okay, here’s my sharing about the NBA Grid Trivia project, just like I’d tell it on my blog:
Alright folks, so I got hooked on this NBA Grid thing lately, and I figured, “Hey, why not try to build my own version?” It seemed like a fun little side project, you know?
So, first things first, I needed a dataset. I mean, you can’t have an NBA trivia game without NBA data, right? I spent a good chunk of time scraping player info, teams, awards – the whole shebang. It was a bit of a pain, cleaning it all up and getting it into a usable format, but hey, gotta do what you gotta do.
Next up was the actual grid logic. I wanted it to be just like the original, where you get nine guesses to fill in the squares based on the criteria given. Figuring out the best way to structure the data so I could quickly check if a player was a valid answer for a particular square took some trial and error, let me tell you.
I started out using Python, because that’s what I’m most comfortable with. I used Pandas to wrangle the data, and then I started building the game logic. It was a lot of “if this, then that” statements, but slowly, it started to take shape. I got the core functionality working – you could enter a player, and it would tell you if it was a correct answer.
But just having it run in the terminal wasn’t gonna cut it, right? I wanted a proper web interface. So I decided to use Flask to build a simple web app around my Python code. It was a bit of a learning curve, getting everything connected, but eventually, I had a basic webpage where you could play the game.
Then came the fun part: making it look decent. I’m no designer, that’s for sure, but I managed to slap together some CSS to make it at least look presentable. Added some team logos, made the grid look nice, and boom – it was starting to look like a real game!
Of course, there were plenty of bumps along the way. I had issues with data validation, making sure people couldn’t just enter random gibberish. And then there was the challenge of coming up with good, challenging combinations for the grid. I had to write some code to automatically generate grid criteria based on the data, which was trickier than I thought.
But after a lot of late nights and debugging, I finally had something I was happy with. It’s not perfect, and it’s definitely not as polished as the original, but it’s my own little NBA Grid clone, and I’m pretty proud of it.
Here are some things I learned along the way:
- Data cleaning is the most important (and most tedious) part of any project like this.
- Flask is pretty awesome for building simple web apps quickly.
- CSS is still a dark art to me.
- There are way more NBA players than I realized.
All in all, it was a really fun and educational experience. I definitely learned a lot about data manipulation, web development, and just how much I love basketball trivia. Maybe I’ll add some more features later on, like daily challenges or a leaderboard. But for now, I’m just happy to have my own little NBA Grid game to play whenever I want. Give it a shot, and let me know what you think!
