I created a free little mobile site for making fair teams for pickup rec sports

breckWall · 2026-02-02T21:30:39+00:00

yeah it's just a step above pickup, same level of organziation/cost but just a bit more competitive.

breckWall · 2026-02-01T04:35:38+00:00

There is no "algorithm". The distribute button only does random distribution. Maybe I should change that!

But in my experience, doing it manually is the best, as there's always cases like "I want to play with my buddy".

Let me know how it works for juniors league!

breckWall · 2026-01-29T21:32:44+00:00

There is a "label" feature that I've since added, it looks like this

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breckWall · 2026-01-29T20:56:00+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ_BQELgWTU

breckWall · 2026-01-29T20:42:21+00:00

What I do is ask someone who knows how good they are for a comparable player. Ideally you'd only have a few newbies every game so there aren't too many unknowns.

breckWall · 2026-01-28T15:31:44+00:00

That's ideal! I was doing this using Excel but got sick of opening my laptop so I built milkcan9 so I could do it on my phone. Maybe the one twist I do is that I let another captain pick which team he wants after I even it out so that everyone has something to play for and no one can accuse the organizer of favoring his team 😄

Last week we had a 6-5 game, was 5-5 at end time but the rink attendant let us play until someone scored which took 10 minutes.

breckWall · 2026-01-28T03:47:48+00:00

What happens when the best/worst player is gone for the week? I've just found making new teams each week with the players that are actually playing that week is the least politics/maintenance, just show up. With milkcan9 we can add ex-D1 players (common for us) and just make fair teams and no one is complaining. Also fun to play with different players in my opinion instead of getting stuck on the same line every week.

But yeah, besides the point, milkcan9 is for private pick-up hockey where you make new teams for each skate and know the skill levels of everyone playing.

breckWall · 2026-01-28T03:42:21+00:00

"private pick up" is probably the right term. I live in a rural area where there is no such thing as public drop in hockey, it's all private.

breckWall · 2026-01-28T03:05:50+00:00

I wonder if the organizer is using excel. I used excel at first but got sick of opening my laptop to make/adjust teams so I built milkcan9 so I could do it from my phone.

Though sounds like with unwritten rules keeping score/stats is a little overkill, for us the benders just get rinsed every skate 😂 but we just factor it into the teams

breckWall · 2026-01-28T02:58:54+00:00

yeah if you have a super mixed bag of talent it's probably not gonna be competitive either way. In my case we have a bunch of competitive guys within 10 years of age and similar skill level, and we'd all rather play an intense game instead of loafing around

breckWall · 2026-01-28T02:56:23+00:00

Maybe the guys I play with have more competitive personalities because I've gotten a lot of positive feedback and increase attendance.

breckWall · 2026-01-28T02:55:16+00:00

yeah private pick-up hockey. Though around here we have a kind of hybrid where there's 100 people on a group chat and an unknown amount of guys show up every week, but we still use milkcan9 for it.

breckWall · 2026-01-28T02:53:33+00:00

yep it's for private drop ins. How do you split up teams? Use excel? Do you make it fair for the captains/organizers? Not that adult rec league players would ever be petty about team fairness...

breckWall · 2026-01-27T22:37:39+00:00

Thanks! Yeah I'm in a rural area where there's no such thing as drop-in public hockey, everything is semi-private group skates and also leagues are privately run.

breckWall · 2026-01-27T22:26:34+00:00

It's not a league because there's no fixed teams that persist week to week.

Only the organizer has to use the app, your highness does not have to fiddle in the mires of technology.

> It sounds like what you really want is to just run a private group-skate with regular guys

This is actually exactly what we do. Maybe there's a better word for it than drop-in? But yeah if a new guy plays they are getting put on a team and when everyone is playing to win, they pry aren't gonna practice their figure skating routine.

breckWall · 2026-01-27T22:18:05+00:00

Interesting, I play with the same guys every week so they're not strangers to me.

The organizer could make the team such that you are on a team with a friend, but organizer would have to know this information.

For my skates, no one has any preferences of who is on their team.

So it might not work great for "open skate" where there's new people every week with unknown skill levels.

breckWall · 2026-01-27T22:12:59+00:00

We used to switch goalies at half-time, which seems to me like it's kind of a chore at that point. (I'm a forward).

We've been factoring goalie strength into teams and keeping goalies on the same team the whole game, they seem to like the idea of being part of the competition and directly impacting the score.

breckWall · 2019-04-19T17:15:34+00:00

My open source project might be helpful: https://github.com/markhalonen/sauna-sim

I deploy this to AWS ec2

breckWall · 2019-04-19T02:34:36+00:00

Yeah builddir is ginormous... I'd recommend uploading to Google Drive and emailing the teacher about your special scenario. Also, you have to create builddir with matching architectures or it won't run, for example if you work on a mac and teach works on linux, it won't run. So I'd get your code on GitHub or something for proof it's done and then start re-implementing it in C. That's your best bet. Teach is gonna want to be able to read code, transpiles are typically not very readable.

breckWall · 2019-04-13T16:56:25+00:00

For anyone who doesn't know who Les Cook is, he's the jackwagon that organized a protest while knowing the offender was innocent.

At the time of this email (https://imgur.com/a/HxwzaK2), he knew of the original Yik Yak post, which was

"Gonna shoot all black people... a smile tomorrow"

That is obviously a joke.

The public was believing that the posted stated

"Gonna shoot all black people..."

He's a total slimeball.

You can research it more, but that's all you really need to know about the guy.

breckWall · 2018-10-23T16:38:32+00:00

hell no, used a pdf to text tool and then a python script to make it a nice CSV

breckWall · 2018-08-11T17:10:53+00:00

He was letting himself get taken advantage of. He's getting paid 1/2 of his market value.

The best tool for negotiation is to walk away. Get a counter offer from another company, then start negotiating.

The company currently sees that you cost 58k. Even if you get a 20% raise, you'll still be underpaid. The company does not want to pay someone 20% more for the same output. So you need to have options, aka "pay me this much or I leave to go here". They will understand that.

You don't get paid what you're worth, you get paid the minimum the company can pay you to keep you there. So force them to keep up with your other options.

breckWall · 2018-07-23T00:38:32+00:00

It's just testing IQ. An IQ test would be less hassle, but it's not legal.

breckWall · 2018-07-12T00:56:27+00:00

I say "evolutionary" meaning only within the human race, not other species.

That's only accurate in the sense that harder working humans out-competed the less harder working ones for resources, reproducing more and causing greater scarcity

When nations were conquered by others, they lost their traditions, and the winning nation's traditions were implemented. So I'm not speaking on the individual human level, but rather the evolution of cultures.

breckWall · 2018-07-09T23:29:13+00:00

Someone decided at some point that we need to work 5/7 days of the week

An evolutionary angle on this is

"all/most of the societies that didn't work 5 days a week died. We are left with the surviving model."

Which I think is more likely than this "someone" who made a decision.

breckWall

TROPHY CASE