Joe Tannenbaum (00:05.52)
Welcome to Side Project. I am Joe Tannenbaum and today we have John Bonaccorsi with us, which I am very excited about. John, a pleasure to meet you. Do you want to tell us a little about yourself before we get started just so we have some context?

John T Bonaccorsi (00:20.234)
Yeah, sure thing. Joe, thanks for having me here. Yeah, as you said, my name is John Bonaccorsi. I live right outside of Philadelphia in New Jersey with my wife, my son. I have another son coming up in August.

Joe Tannenbaum (00:22.588)
Of course.

John T Bonaccorsi (00:32.832)
If anyone listening to the podcast has ever heard of my name, was probably from my time working at Tighten which is a Laravel agency. I was a lead programmer there for six years. I now work at another company called Biznow, also doing a lot of deep Laravel work. And in my free time, I do some woodworking, some pizza making, and a lot of watching TV.

Joe Tannenbaum (00:54.064)
Okay, wait, so pizza making, what do we make and what's the staple? What is the standard issue pizza in your household? Or is it all experimental?

John T Bonaccorsi (01:02.438)
yeah, I mean what I'm really working on these days, well, and I, with two kids almost, I barely have any time for this, but prior to having kids when I was kind of doing this more often, I was really focusing on the dough. So, you know, like playing with the hydration levels, the fermentation time, kind of getting all that right. Yeah. So I was exactly, I was worried less about like, it was usually just making plain pies, which is my favorite kind of pie anyway. But, yeah, but that's what I was kind of working on. And I got a little sidetracked when my, my, my kids were born, but,

Joe Tannenbaum (01:18.866)
getting serious about it, getting legit with it, yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (01:31.34)
I'll be back to it deeper one day soon.

Joe Tannenbaum (01:33.972)
I mean, it does come down to the dough, right? Like, is everything else, like you could play with the sauce, you can make it sweeter, not as sweet, something like that, but like, it does come down to the dough at the end of the day. like, what does that crust taste like? What does the base taste like? And I think that's, are you going like thick, thin, medium?

John T Bonaccorsi (01:49.39)
I like a thin pie. I like a really, really thin pie. I like a long fermentation period, like have a three day fermentation. That's really wonderful. Yeah, yeah, that's my favorite. Yeah, I just like, yeah, you're right. It is all about the dough at end of the day, but so I'd like to spend time on that and, you know, even just making breads or whatever. But again, hoping to get more into that in the future when I have a little more free time, but it's definitely a passion too.

Joe Tannenbaum (01:51.102)
then bye. man, alright.

wow, that's legit.

Joe Tannenbaum (02:07.474)
Nice.

Joe Tannenbaum (02:12.357)
Awesome. Okay, so you posted something that caught my eye and I was like, this is critical that we talk about this because for several reasons, I don't know anything about this on any level. And so all I want you to do is talk and tell me. So you posted that you run this, I guess you would call it a side project called fantasybb.com, which is a fantasy big brother league. Is that correct?

John T Bonaccorsi (02:23.061)
Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (02:29.549)
year.

John T Bonaccorsi (02:33.954)
Mm-hmm.

That's right.

John T Bonaccorsi (02:40.757)
Mm-hmm. yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (02:41.925)
Okay, and you just hit 50k users on this side project?

John T Bonaccorsi (02:46.125)
Yeah, so this is an interesting side project because it's, and this will change soon, but it's a seasonal side project. So it only runs currently, and this again, this is about to change, but currently, historically, it's only run in the summer. So we kind of have like three months where we're gaining users and then we get nothing for nine months. And so last summer, 2024, we ended the year with a little over 50,000 users. It might've been like 51,000, but yeah, roughly 50,000.

Joe Tannenbaum (02:52.559)
race.

Joe Tannenbaum (02:57.863)
Okay.

Joe Tannenbaum (03:08.145)
Wow. And how long has this site been around?

John T Bonaccorsi (03:11.245)
The site has been around since it launched in 2018 and the first year we got about 300 users. It was a small start. And then in subsequent years, we've kind of averaged, you know, maybe year two was like 5,000, year three was eight. And these days we tend to average about 10,000 new users every summer when we launch, typically speaking. Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (03:14.694)
Okay.

Joe Tannenbaum (03:18.726)
Okay.

Joe Tannenbaum (03:35.003)
Wow, okay, I have a hundred questions in one observation. I didn't know Big Brother was still on, I'm gonna be honest. So this has been running forever. This show has been running for so long then.

John T Bonaccorsi (03:39.917)
Sure.

John T Bonaccorsi (03:47.752)
Yeah, if anyone is listening right now is not familiar with what Big Brother is, because a lot of people probably have either never heard of it or they've heard of it. Yeah, so they've probably never even heard of it or they've heard of it and they're like, wait, didn't that get canceled like 20 years ago? Like, who's watching that? And like the answer is me, you know, I'm watching it. yeah. Yeah, no, so yeah, Big Brother is about to head into its 27th season.

Joe Tannenbaum (03:54.204)
It's me. It's me. I don't know even how works.

Joe Tannenbaum (04:04.861)
Clearly well over 50,000 people because I guarantee everybody's, yeah. Okay, go ahead.

John T Bonaccorsi (04:14.605)
um this this year which is actually which sounds like a lot but then actually survivor which is another tv show is on season 49 i think so they big brother is only yearly i think survivor does multi years um they do like two seasons

Joe Tannenbaum (04:16.541)
Whoa.

Joe Tannenbaum (04:23.119)
Wait.

Joe Tannenbaum (04:28.357)
It's still impressive, regardless of how you slice that, it's very impressive to keep it to the other show on that

John T Bonaccorsi (04:33.613)
Yeah, for sure. And again, again, I know we're talking about Big Brother and a lot of people have probably not heard of it or barely whatever. if so, if anyone is unaware of what it is, Big Brother is a TV show. It's a reality TV show. It launched in, I believe it was 2000 for season one. It is essentially most people are probably a little bit familiar with Survivor where like there's a group of people on an island and each week someone gets eliminated from the island or something like that. Big Brother is very, very similar to Survivor, except instead of it being on an island, it's in a house and the people are locked in there for three

Joe Tannenbaum (04:46.482)
Okay.

John T Bonaccorsi (05:03.667)
straight and there's like live feeds that you can watch like from your house at any time you want so you can directly watch these people live for three months straight if you'd like and yeah it's about to hit into its 27th season every week people get nominated they get voted out and at the end there's one winner at the end of the summer and it basically airs every single summer so if anyone's not familiar what Big Brother is that's what it is

Joe Tannenbaum (05:22.855)
and they cannot leave the house for three months.

John T Bonaccorsi (05:25.525)
they do not leave the house at all. I mean, if they get evicted, then they leave and they go home. But yeah, otherwise if you're in the game, I mean, there's some people who have spent like hundreds of days in that house across like multiple seasons. So yeah, you cannot leave.

Joe Tannenbaum (05:29.681)
Well, yeah, sure.

Joe Tannenbaum (05:38.747)
And what's this? This doesn't even have to do with the side product, but I'm just curious, like, what's the food situation? They get food delivered to them like groceries and stuff. Or they're or it's like they're farming inside the house like they're it's agriculture. What are we doing here?

John T Bonaccorsi (05:42.379)
Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (05:46.198)
boy, yeah, you're touching on something interesting here, so...

John T Bonaccorsi (05:52.532)
Sometimes so there was a season with a pig in it. So they did have a pig one time but so historically so food is basically Earlier big brother. They said these things called food competitions where they would have to earn

through games, the food that they could eat for the week. So they'd be like, okay, we have competition and we can either get meats or vegetables or fruits or whatever, right? But we can only get two of them and so we have to decide what do we want as a house? And then there's this concept of people who are what they call have-nots, which is essentially they could, back in the day it was that they could only eat peanut butter and jelly for the whole week. But now it's become in modern iteration, it's this thing called slop, where they basically have to eat this disgusting gooey oatmeal type of situation. They have to eat that for an entire week.

So yeah, they do if you're not a have-not you get like probably all the food that you want delivered to you in the house like the production will bring it to them through the refrigerator or whatever But otherwise you might be eating some disgusting like oatmeal type goop gross stuff

Joe Tannenbaum (06:48.507)
Okay, I guess like, wow, waivers go a long way because that's like, how is that legal? But also, how do you okay, not to we won't dive too deep into this. But how do you become a have not like what how does that arise? Or are you opting into that? What are you doing?

John T Bonaccorsi (07:04.089)
So sometimes, yeah, and again, is like, Big Brother's been going for 27 years, so like things have changed over the years. Earlier on, there were sometimes competitions where if you lost a competition, you were a have-not for the week. In recent years, it's been mostly like volunteer basis for most of the time. So sometimes people would just volunteer. It's almost like a way, if you think about it, like it's a social game, right? So if you kind of take a hit for the team and you go on this disgusting diet for a week.

Joe Tannenbaum (07:09.01)
Right.

John T Bonaccorsi (07:28.041)
you're kind of hedging a bet like from a social standpoint, are people gonna be a little bit less likely to target me because I'm taking this hit for the team? it's all a little bit of a big brother, you know, if you think about it, it's really like a mental social chess game in like real life. So every decision you make, you're trying to build up your social standing, you're trying to power through competitions. It's a really interesting show and I just kind of attribute it to like mental chess or social chess basically. Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (07:40.645)
Great.

Joe Tannenbaum (07:51.689)
Fascinating. Okay, so you're clearly a Big Brother fan. You've probably been watching it for a long time. And how did this, since you were 10, okay. And so how did this come about? How did the fantasy BB come about? Like what was the seed of the idea?

John T Bonaccorsi (07:58.104)
Since I was 10. Mm-hmm.

John T Bonaccorsi (08:07.487)
Yeah, okay, so.

I'm going to go on, I'm going to do a little story here, try not to make it too long to kind of, cause I think the background is interesting. I'm always curious to see like how do people come up with their side projects. So I've been watching big brother since I was actually probably nine when it came out, cause I was nine for the beginning of summer in 2000. So I'm nine years old. Big brother comes out, you know, I'm a fan. I've been watching it from season one all the way back then until now. Um, and what happens is after I graduate from college, I get a job in a web development agency, um, in Philadelphia in the fist on Philadelphia. And, um, and it's

Joe Tannenbaum (08:16.402)
Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (08:39.085)
a very small company. It's like 12 people and it's mostly younger guys. it's like typically like I'm at the time I'm like 21 years old because I just graduated from college. But the other people there are like guys who are anywhere from like 25 to know the early 30s. So it's a group of like younger guys. And it's it's like typical guys guys at this company. You know so these guys like there's a kegerator in the office. There's there's a you know the deal right. There's a

Joe Tannenbaum (08:55.122)
Great.

Joe Tannenbaum (09:04.082)
it's one of those, okay. That says it all right there, yeah, yeah, for sure.

John T Bonaccorsi (09:08.909)
Yeah, there's a pool table. A lot of these guys played golf in high school or they played baseball or something like that. And so I come in and I don't drink. I've never watched a football game in my life. I'm just not in this mold at all. I like watching Bridgerton on Netflix. I'm not doing the typical guy stuff, which is totally fine on both ends. It's cool for them, it's cool for me, it's whatever. But at this young age, I'm realizing like...

Joe Tannenbaum (09:13.778)
huh.

Joe Tannenbaum (09:21.895)
Okay.

Joe Tannenbaum (09:26.555)
Wait wait wait.

John T Bonaccorsi (09:36.878)
Wow, I'm at risk of of falling out of the collective group here because I can't bond with them on anything. They're going out for drinks after work. I don't drink. I don't watch the games that they're doing. I don't do any of it. So I'm kind of sitting there and I gotta make sure I don't fall out of this group, that I don't socially isolate myself because I don't have any shared interests. And so, shortly into my first year there, they kind of send around an email that they're doing a fantasy football league.

Joe Tannenbaum (09:52.431)
Right

John T Bonaccorsi (10:02.441)
And I'm like, well, I don't literally never watched a football game in my life. I don't know the rules of football. I don't know what this is. But I know this is something I can do for my computer with the team. Right. So I'm like, OK, I. Yeah, I'm like, I don't have to leave my house. I don't have to actually do anything. So I'll just I can sit with them and do this. So we do the fantasy football draft for that year. You know, I don't know.

Joe Tannenbaum (10:08.635)
Right.

Joe Tannenbaum (10:12.883)
You're like, check, check. Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (10:24.631)
who I'm drafting, but I'm just kind of picking people that look tough or whatever, I don't know anything, you know? they all look tough, that's the problem, you Yeah, so you know, I do that and the league goes through the year and I probably finish, I think, like second, I'm second to last, like I'm terrible, it's all bad. But the interesting thing that happens is I have a lot of fun with it.

Joe Tannenbaum (10:29.215)
You look tough. You're on my team. Honestly, same boat. I don't know anything about sports, so I'd be doing the same thing.

John T Bonaccorsi (10:47.339)
Like in a way that I'm not expecting, like it's just the camaraderie is fun. It's fun going on and checking the points every week. It's fun like trading players. And again, even though I'm not into football at all and I wasn't expecting it to be an enjoyable experience, I just come out of it. I'm like, wow, that was fun. And so, yeah, and so that gets my gears turning at the time. I'm like, imagine if something like this existed for something that I actually cared about.

Joe Tannenbaum (11:03.815)
That's awesome.

John T Bonaccorsi (11:12.429)
like wouldn't that be even better if I could do that? And so then I think about, what are the things in my life that are kind of correlated to like football, like kind of a sportsy type thing, or something that I'm interested in, and I immediately go to Big Brother. I'm like, oh, I watch this every year, just like football, know, it's like seasonal, comes out for a couple months, there's, you know, things, people win things, they lose games, whatever, all that kind of thing. It's similar to a sport in a certain sense.

Joe Tannenbaum (11:12.957)
There we go.

Joe Tannenbaum (11:31.731)
Right.

John T Bonaccorsi (11:34.446)
And I kinda go, interesting, I wonder if this exists. So I Google it and I go like, okay, like Big Brother Fantasy League. And this is in probably like 2012, 2013, whatever. And I try to find something and there's some stuff out there. There's a lot of people I notice on Reddit who are doing like Google Sheets custom things where they're like, they these.

Joe Tannenbaum (11:54.307)
Right. Like janky versions of it. Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (11:56.705)
Super janky. I'm like, okay, this is interesting and there's people who are doing it with them like strangers and they're having fun with them I'm like, okay, that's not really what I'm looking for. There's also some other apps out there that Seem to be doing like more general kind of abstracted fantasy stuff. There's one out there called fantasize or I think it's still still a thing And I'm like, okay, like I open it, you know, what's an app and I'm not gonna talk poorly about it I'm sure it's it's fine for a lot of different use cases. But as I'm looking at it, I'm like this is a game that ideally if I'm gonna be playing like this version of

Joe Tannenbaum (12:10.919)
Mm-hmm.

John T Bonaccorsi (12:26.319)
fantasy football basically, it's gotta be something that my mom can also use, right? it's gotta be something, cause this is something I'm gonna be playing with my family, not my friends, it's not like my football buddies, right? This is gonna be something I'm playing with my mom and my dad and my sister.

Joe Tannenbaum (12:30.791)
Right.

Joe Tannenbaum (12:38.035)
And also the demographic that watches is probably extremely wide. Like it's like young and old, like everybody, it's got to be like across the board, right? Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (12:46.413)
Yeah, it's probably 10 to like 80 year old, and as old as you can be, right? So it's like everybody. Yeah, so I'm looking at these other apps and I'm like...

Joe Tannenbaum (12:50.799)
Everybody. It's everybody. Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (12:55.755)
My mom could never use this. you know, and I'm not trying to pick on moms in general. Like my mom just is not technologically savvy and she would be the first to admit it. Right. And so, and I'm like, okay, like I, none of these things are really fitting. And then, you know, this is just at the time. so anyway, so I didn't get this idea and, I sit with her for a couple of years. Cause the truth is I just don't have the technological experience to build it. Like I have the idea, but it's 2012. I just graduated. I was mostly doing Drupal and WordPress PHP development. Like I've never built an app before. don't think Laravel is even out yet at that point.

Joe Tannenbaum (13:03.003)
For sure, yeah, yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (13:21.821)
Yep.

Joe Tannenbaum (13:26.264)
Barely, Yeah, I can't remember. Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (13:27.739)
If it was, it probably was barely a thing at that point. And so I just kind of sit with the idea for that time. And then, you know, 2014 Laravel, I don't know what your Laravel technically got released, but that's, I get into Laravel around 4.2, 4.1 area. And that's like, it's like towards the beginning of 2014, end of 2013, when I start getting into it. I think I see a post from my tailor on Reddit literally being like, I built this thing. And I'm like, oh, this is interesting. So I started.

Joe Tannenbaum (13:43.975)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (13:52.628)
Right? You should build a fantasy app with it. It's a good idea. Yeah. Yeah, he knew what the use case was.

John T Bonaccorsi (13:55.63)
Exactly. Yeah, he was spot on. was spot on. Taylor, he's very smart guy.

He did, he did. So I'm like, oh, this is interesting. I start getting into that. I start working with it for a couple more years. And then 2017, I get a job at Tighten, which is like a big, you know, player of all focus company. And I started to get even more experience. And that's at the point where I finally go like, you know, this idea that's been like percolating in my mind for five years now, I think I finally have the technical skill to build it. And then that's when the journey begins to building this thing. So yeah, that's the that's the long, maybe too long story of the background of it. But that's where it came from.

Joe Tannenbaum (14:24.914)
Yeah.

Wow.

No, it's good. It's great. So the stack is Laravel and what is your, is it just blade or what's the front end looking like?

John T Bonaccorsi (14:32.491)
Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (14:41.322)
deep question, because it's changed so much. one of the...

Joe Tannenbaum (14:43.621)
Okay, how did it start? Where is it now? How did it progress?

John T Bonaccorsi (14:47.309)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's been interesting. One of the core things that I've tried to do with this side project specifically is like I always have wanted to be, because it's very old now actually, I it was built in 2017-18, so now it's coming up on seven, eight years old. But it's always been my personal goal that if anyone ever opened it, and no one other than me ever does, so it's kind of a useless thing. But like I always wanted someone to be able to open this thing if they ever did and say, this looks like it was built this year. Like this is fresh. I didn't want you to be able to see the tree rings. Yeah, yeah. So you know back in 2017,

Joe Tannenbaum (14:58.92)
Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (15:04.499)
You

Joe Tannenbaum (15:12.531)
It's a great North Star. I love that. Yeah, yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (15:17.383)
when I first started building this thing. It's Laravel, it's Blade, and it's View. It's View components injected in certain parts where I have a toggle or something like that. It's fine, it works. I kind of hate it because there's certain things inside the View component that I want...

Joe Tannenbaum (15:25.212)
Okay.

Joe Tannenbaum (15:29.981)
Got it, yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (15:38.508)
to use a blade component in. like, well, can't, now I gotta like duplicate this blade component to be in the view component too. I hate it, but view is just what I know at the time, right? So I'm like, okay, fair enough. What happens later is that the next year stimulus gets released. And if anyone doesn't know what stimulus is, stimulus is like a front end library that Basecamp, I guess 37 signals released.

Joe Tannenbaum (15:41.555)
Yeah, yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (16:01.267)
Yes, it sounds familiar, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (16:04.021)
Yeah, I once wrote an extremely long, too long, blog post on Tighten. I don't think anyone ever read, maybe my mom read it, I don't know. But like, it's an extremely long detailed guide on how to use stimulus. And so I got really into it for a minute because...

Joe Tannenbaum (16:10.845)
Huh!

John T Bonaccorsi (16:16.235)
What I was looking for was something that wasn't a virtual DOM, but wasn't jQuery either, you know? So that's what stimulus was at the time. so I'm like, okay, this new thing is out. I can get rid of view. So the second year I refactor everything to stimulus on the front end. I'm like, okay, it's better I think than having a view and blade, but I also kind of hate, it. Like it's, it's kind of not, I don't like it. Like it's not for me, but I'm like, okay, it's all that's here. It's like either this or jQuery or whatever. So anyway, again, this is an interesting thing again, because it's seasonal. So like.

Joe Tannenbaum (16:20.655)
Right. Right.

Joe Tannenbaum (16:40.305)
Yep. Yep.

John T Bonaccorsi (16:46.159)
every time the show ends I have nine months to figure out what I'm doing for the next year you know so

Joe Tannenbaum (16:47.909)
Yeah, it's pretty great actually. It's, you know, it's a cool business to run. mean, or a side project to run, guess.

John T Bonaccorsi (16:54.637)
Yeah, it's not bad. So like every year I'm kind like, what am I changing this year? Like I'm gonna rip the whole thing apart. So I do that the third year.

Caleb Porzier releases something called Project X, which later becomes Alpine, JS. So I see that and now Caleb, I worked with Caleb at Tighten for a little bit, you know, I trust his vision and I know it's going to be great. So I go, you know, before it's even really released and like, okay, Project X, I refactor the whole front end once again from stimulus to Project X and then later to Alpine, you know, when he does the official release. And I'm like, okay, this is like, this feels great. I love this, blah, blah. And it pretty much stays that way for a couple of years. There's some things that I'm still hacking together at that point.

Joe Tannenbaum (17:06.758)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John T Bonaccorsi (17:32.448)
I think I'm using like sweet alert for modals like triggered by Alpine, which I'm kind of like this sucks I kind of like sweet alert, but well sweet alerts fine, but I don't like like having these different libraries at all different stuff and Little Frankenstein. Yeah, and so I'm like, okay But this is definitely like the best iteration of it so far and then over time, know Caleb releases Alpine component patterns or I forget what it's called. I think it was Alpine components or That's I don't really

Joe Tannenbaum (17:34.706)
Mm.

Joe Tannenbaum (17:41.715)
Feels a little Frankenstein-y, yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (17:54.293)
Stop playing UI or something, or is that it? Is that later? I don't know.

John T Bonaccorsi (17:58.518)
I know, it's Alpine, something Alpine components. He releases that, I start using Netflix modals and stuff, and then long story short, when he finally releases LiveWire 3.

Joe Tannenbaum (18:02.182)
Okay.

John T Bonaccorsi (18:07.821)
I'm like this this is the thing because I don't want to have any JavaScript, know, but I just want to like use this so the current stack of today is Laravel obviously livewire on top of that Alpine Flux for components for certain things like modals drop-downs all that kind of stuff. That's a new thing. I've had it this year too and tailwind on the front end

Joe Tannenbaum (18:12.169)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Tannenbaum (18:24.744)
Wait.

John T Bonaccorsi (18:30.185)
And the beautiful thing about this project is that it's not like extremely heavy JavaScript. I guess it's not like one of those apps where things are just flying around everywhere. But there's a lot of drop downs. There's a lot of modals and stuff like that. But if you open up my app.js file, it's empty. Like it just has imports for like Alpine stuff. And that's it. And the rest of the app is all like in the LiveWire in the blade. So that's the stack as of today. It's by far my favorite thing to work in. Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (18:37.214)
Right.

Joe Tannenbaum (18:47.017)
Yep.

Joe Tannenbaum (18:50.452)
That feels good.

Joe Tannenbaum (18:54.482)
Nice. So you currently have 50,000 users. Were there growing pains? there moments where you were like, was there any indication that you're like, I need to fix this part of it? Was there bottlenecks? Like, did anything come out of like scaling to 50,000 users? Cause I assume during the three months, it's probably a pretty active user base, I would imagine. Okay.

John T Bonaccorsi (19:15.202)
John T Bonaccorsi (19:19.627)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there times when like premiere nights where we'll have thousands and thousands of activities just like at one point in time. now luckily because of things, the way things work with time zones, a lot of that gets distributed unintentionally, you know, cause like people watching in California three hours later. So I don't get like this huge global rush. I kind of get these little regional rushes. You know, it's actually interesting. Like in terms of, there's definitely been moments where...

Joe Tannenbaum (19:26.386)
Wait.

Joe Tannenbaum (19:31.188)
Mmm, yep.

John T Bonaccorsi (19:45.486)
I think I, and I'm really not an IT ops person, frankly, so like I don't always know like what I'm doing when I'm like buying the digital ocean boxes or whatever. There were certainly times in the beginning where the site would like on premiere night would like go down for a couple seconds and then come back up like as it got overloaded with traffic.

Joe Tannenbaum (19:53.396)
Wait, wait.

Joe Tannenbaum (20:01.821)
Mm-hmm.

John T Bonaccorsi (20:03.533)
And you know, the way I basically addressed that was next time buying bigger servers. like instead of the $5 digital ocean box, I'm on like the $30 digital ocean box. Obviously trying to fine tune the database queries as much as possible, know, composite indexes, all kinds of stuff like that to make sure that things are speedy and not taking up too much of the CPU or whatever. But luckily I've never had an issue where it's like, oh my gosh, the entire site has been down for the whole day because it got so much killed the traffic. I think the fact that the time zone issue really helps with that a lot.

Joe Tannenbaum (20:12.712)
Right.

Joe Tannenbaum (20:33.436)
Yeah, you got a little distribution there. That's nice.

John T Bonaccorsi (20:33.487)
Yeah, so in terms of like scaling, I've really just tried to add basic caching indexes wherever I can find them and then just probably over provisioning the servers just a little bit, you know, when needed and that's it. But I have never had a disaster story, thankfully. It's always been pretty stable. Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (20:49.51)
Okay, that's amazing. Do you get a lot of feedback? Do people write in, contact you about this? you get feature requests? Is there any sort of user communication on this?

John T Bonaccorsi (21:01.471)
yeah, there's great stuff because this, for the most part, you know...

50,000 users, which is crazy to me now thinking about it because when I launched it, was like, if a hundred people ever use this, that'll be kind of cool. And now it's, 50,000 users, which is awesome. And yeah, people are, you know, I, the primary driver originally, maybe to this day, even I don't know, maybe less so was Reddit. So when I first did this, you know, there's a big brother subreddit and I posted there when it came out and I was like, here's this thing I built, like use it if you want. those first couple of years, especially people would just leave comments on the Reddit posts and be like, then most of the time,

Joe Tannenbaum (21:12.326)
Wait, yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (21:26.292)
Alright.

John T Bonaccorsi (21:35.776)
5 % of time people are very nice and they're like, this thing is cool, but like why can't I do this or that? Well, phbreddit is very different from tv reddit. There's like a very distinct difference there.

Joe Tannenbaum (21:39.422)
But you said Reddit, that can't be true. That's... Yeah, there's a line there probably.

John T Bonaccorsi (21:47.662)
And don't get me wrong, I sometimes get emails where people are this is something upset about the points or something like that. We're like, this is ridiculous. And they're kind of mean about it. I don't take any that to heart. It's just kind of, like, the good thing about this project is that it's not managing payments. It's not doing anything important to the world truly. And that's kind of why I love it, which is that if it goes down, it goes down. And I don't believe it's not that big of a deal. It's just a game. And now it's important to me that it's a good experience for the users. I really tried to have it not have problems, but at the end of the day,

Joe Tannenbaum (21:53.616)
Sure, of course.

Joe Tannenbaum (22:08.701)
Yeah.

Wait.

John T Bonaccorsi (22:17.615)
the So I don't have to worry that someone's losing business or anything like that. You know, it's just it's just for fun. But yeah, I get emails, I get Reddit posts, I get DMs on Twitter and Blue Sky, I get all kinds of stuff. And honestly, man, some of the greatest things I've I mean, I've gotten some really great feedback that's made me stop in my tracks. So to give a just a quick example, the first year when I launched this, you know, when you when you're on this app, have to like create leagues, and then you invite your friends to the league, and then you do a draft and you get points and stuff like that. And the first year that this happened,

The invitation system I had set up was like you'd have to like type your friend's email into the system and it would send them an email and say you're invited to this thing. And you know and it was just like I it was all I came up with at the time but it was kind of bad because sometimes emails would fall through you know for whatever reason and people wouldn't be like where's my invite and then someone I read it at some point it was just like hey man can you just like give us like a link to send to them and I was like how did I not think of that you know like why like I can't believe I

Joe Tannenbaum (22:52.829)
Okay.

Joe Tannenbaum (23:03.698)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Tannenbaum (23:10.823)
Yeah.

Yeah, the tunnel vision just falls away and you're like, there is a link. Whoa.

John T Bonaccorsi (23:17.611)
Like a link, a URL, like how am gonna think about this? And I was like, my God, this guy is totally right. And so not only did I update that like right away, I removed like so much code, because the email system was so much more complicated. And I was like, so I really try to read every bit of feedback I get, because you don't know when there's just some kind of hidden gem in there that you're just not thinking about. Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (23:22.621)
Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (23:29.267)
Of course. Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (23:36.307)
That's awesome. Was there anything that you particularly enjoyed building when you were building this out or things that you added that you enjoyed like coding up or writing or did anything stick out as like, that was fun. I would do that again. Or I have fond memories of building out that feature or something.

John T Bonaccorsi (23:52.927)
yeah, mean, kind of... So many things. It's been a really fun project because I kind of like...

encapsulates certain parts of like, this is this system or this is that system. One of the biggest ones is obviously the draft system. So, you know, like if you and I were in a league together, you know, let's say there's 16 people in the season, a big brother, you know, we'd have to do this draft. Each one of us would draft our players. And, you know, so we'd each get eight contestants. But there's an interesting thing that happens there where it's like, OK, we each have to do a draft. And there could be any amount of people in the league up to like 16, basically, because there's 16 houseguests on the show.

Joe Tannenbaum (24:04.807)
Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (24:27.823)
So I have to account for like the entire draft system has to account for okay How many people how many players does each person in the league have at any given time? Who's next in line to make their player and they also like zigzags back and forth as a snake draft So it's like if the draft order is one two three, then once it hits three it goes back to three to one So like it's keeping track of okay is the draft currently reversed? Are there enough are there enough people left to do another round like let's say there's only two people left after round three But there's three people in the

Joe Tannenbaum (24:27.933)
Wait.

Joe Tannenbaum (24:51.46)
John T Bonaccorsi (24:57.743)
Well, there's not enough people to draft so at that point it has to end early. You know, you can't have two people with one person.

Joe Tannenbaum (25:02.483)
So they just go undrafted. just like, don't, that's nothing. I don't know how this works. I have no sports knowledge. I have no fantasy league knowledge. have nothing.

John T Bonaccorsi (25:11.373)
Yeah, so this is another one of those interesting things about football, which is different, which is in football, there's like hundreds of players. So there's always like these pickups, know, Big Brother, there's 16 every year, roughly. So currently, yes, those people go on draft. We did release a feature two years ago called swaps, which basically means you could drop a player off your roster and pick one up who was undrafted if you wanted the person instead. So that's kind of a way to mitigate it. And one of the features I've been working on this year, which I don't think will launch this year, but will launch soon after, is this concept of like multi-draft, which is that

Joe Tannenbaum (25:15.964)
Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (25:30.617)
okay.

John T Bonaccorsi (25:41.382)
Like let's say there's two people left over and then sometimes like a house gets added later in the season like someone will come into the house. So then all of a third would be available and if you have three people in your league, technically you could pick up those three. And so one of my goals long term is to have this thing where if somebody gets added to the show, it would start off a new draft and then you could draft those people again and pick them up and stuff like that. So there's ways I've worked on mitigating it but it's definitely a pain point because again it's not like football where you have hundreds of people playing. You've got your 16 options and that's it.

Joe Tannenbaum (25:47.346)
Wait.

Joe Tannenbaum (26:08.765)
Great, super limited pool, yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (26:11.243)
Yeah, so the draft is interesting. The point system is extremely interesting because when I was building this around the first time, like the first year I did this, man, it was so I had such limited experience with like just building apps in general. But I think the first time I wrote the app, like, you know, when I talk about points system, I'm talking like, you you draft your players and then each week people do things that get you points. Like they win something or other and the person who has that person gets the point. And then when you go to your league page, there's like a leaderboard which is like how many points this person has.

Joe Tannenbaum (26:36.005)
Wait, wait.

John T Bonaccorsi (26:41.307)
And I think the first year I didn't know how to write the MySQL query to calculate that data. So I literally injected all of this stuff into the front end and parsed it with JavaScript to build that. I had these hidden divs. I had these hidden divs.

Joe Tannenbaum (26:45.753)
Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (26:54.215)
Yes, dude. Yes, dude. it makes me happy. That's awesome. Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (26:58.509)
It's horrible, right? But like, and that's just a good thing, a good example for anyone listening, which is like, you don't have to be an expert at all this stuff. You don't have to know how to write this complicated query. This just, my users didn't care like how I was doing it, right? was whatever. But now the draft, I'm sorry, the point system is a lot different because it's all done with like these kind of sub queries. They kind of calculate everything that's going on. And, and that one's really complicated because of again, that issue of time zones, which is that people are using this app all over the world and all over the country at the very least.

Joe Tannenbaum (27:04.337)
Yeah, just figure it out. Yeah. Ugh.

John T Bonaccorsi (27:28.463)
And you know the problem is like so here's an interesting thing about and this is probably the most complicated part of the app that has also been one of the most fun things to work on but also the most frustrating which is that you know every dev hates working with time zones and this is what sparked that original blue sky post that I did there every dev hates working with time zones and this app is essentially all time zone driven because I can't spoil the show for people who are logging on in like California so I have to account for time zones

Joe Tannenbaum (27:28.757)
Joe Tannenbaum (27:38.855)
Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (27:44.198)
Right, right.

Joe Tannenbaum (27:53.625)
Wait. Wait.

John T Bonaccorsi (27:58.416)
of different places throughout the app. But the other interesting thing is that...

It's really weird conceptually because like for instance, Big Brother airs at eight o'clock on Wednesdays, let's say, right? So you go, okay, in north and what would it be in Eastern time, Big Brother is on at eight o'clock. You know, that's one of these. So that's when things happen. Well, in central time in Chicago, let's say, Big Brother is on at 7 p.m. But that's the same moment in time. So like seven o'clock is eight o'clock here. And then you go, okay, so now I'm not just dealing with time zones.

Joe Tannenbaum (28:09.757)
Okay.

Joe Tannenbaum (28:23.506)
Right.

Yes. Yes.

John T Bonaccorsi (28:33.237)
differently with time zones, but almost this concept of like, okay, there's the time zone, but then there's now, like a point in time. And then you have a different situation, which is like in California, Big Brother is also on at eight o'clock, just like in the northeast, in the eastern, but three hours later, right? So you can't even think about it in the sense of like, you know, where is somebody, it's all about like...

Joe Tannenbaum (28:40.379)
huh, huh.

Joe Tannenbaum (28:48.531)
but it's three hours later than, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

John T Bonaccorsi (28:57.365)
what is happening, what is it right now and what's happened relative to the current user? Because people from a league might be in three different locations, they can't all see the same thing. So I have to customize the experience per user, not only on what shows up on your league, but also how the points are calculated on the leaderboard, all kinds of stuff. It's really, really funky, but fun, but really funky too. Yeah, yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (29:02.107)
Yes.

Joe Tannenbaum (29:12.208)
Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (29:16.337)
That's a cool challenge. That's very cool. I used to work a long time ago at a CLE company. It's a continuing legal education company and time zones were the bane of my existence because you had to make sure that they got their credits before their local midnight on certain dates, blah, blah, blah. And just like, you know, I just know too many things about time zones at this point that like, I don't really need anymore, but like, it's just always lodged in my brain. So that's.

John T Bonaccorsi (29:40.737)
Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (29:45.709)
fascinating. Is that would you say that's that sounds probably like the hardest part of the app I would imagine is like, that's pretty beefy.

John T Bonaccorsi (29:54.251)
Yeah, it's

And it's funny, was something when I started building this app seven years ago, didn't, I don't think the first year I even really thought about it very much. I was like, I just was thinking like, I live in Philadelphia. Like everything happens, it's like a narcissistic way of thinking, right? It's like, I'm the center of the universe. Like people don't do things in other places. And I think I realized like a month or two before the first year, like I was like, wait a minute, someone could look at this app in California and if the show wasn't for me, they're going to get spoiled. And I had to suddenly do it. I mean, I've really refined it over time. Like the original version of it was very JavaScripty, very like reading the user's browser time zone or whatever. And being like, okay, let's hide this or that.

Joe Tannenbaum (30:05.536)
Yeah, I'm the center of the universe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

John T Bonaccorsi (30:26.671)
And now it's become more complicated with like, you know, polymorphic tables and a bunch of really complicated sub queries to get the right data and stuff like that. I would say it's up there. I mean, the draft system is somewhat complicated, but this one's complicated technically and it's also just kind of complicated conceptually. So it's a little bit of a double whammy. Like whenever I sit down to work on, like, wait, I got to wrap my head around like, what time is it? Where does this thing air in Chicago? Like, oh wait, is Chicago delayed because there was a golf game that went long, but, but, but Eastern Philadelphia isn't.

Joe Tannenbaum (30:31.857)
Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (30:45.511)
Wait... Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (30:55.631)
So like, how do I account for that kind of thing? Because you sometimes... Sure am, Joe. Sure am. You're exactly right. Yeah, so I...

Joe Tannenbaum (30:58.139)
So are you tracking TV schedules for this? that what you're doing? And are you like storing local air dates in like every time zone basically? Whoa. And then wait, this leads me to the question I really have, which is like, are you live watching and inputting data as you're watching? Is that basically what's happening? Okay. So, so because I don't know anything about how fantasy leagues really work. So I know, I think I know that in sports like

John T Bonaccorsi (31:18.133)
I sure am. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (31:28.087)
there are points attached to different things. like, like number of touchdowns, like a certain place happening, right? So it's like kind of attached to different actions. And then the same goes for the house where like, what, like, what gets you points? Like what are the sorts of things that would like sway the points one way or the other?

John T Bonaccorsi (31:46.294)
Yeah, so,

It's again, it's, it's very specific to Big Brother. So if someone doesn't know Big Brother, might be tough to talk about, like, so the way Big Brother kind of works format wise real quick is like, you know, every week someone wins something called the head of household. whoever wins that game, that kind of competition, they get into power for that week. Their job is to nominate two people for what they call the block. Those are the people who are at risk of going home. there's also mid week, there's a veto competition where the people who are nominated play to potentially win to get off of the block. if they, somebody wins that they can take themselves down.

Joe Tannenbaum (31:58.26)
Okay.

Joe Tannenbaum (32:14.607)
Okay.

John T Bonaccorsi (32:18.145)
and then the head of household has to replace that person with somebody else. And at the end of the week there's a vote.

By all the houseguests about who gets evicted And then there's others there's a thousand other things that happen throughout the season where there's like luxury competitions and special prize things and all kinds of stuff like that But if you just kind of think about it at the highest like most simple level You know head of household gets you like five points winning the veto competition gets you three points if you use the veto you get an extra two points if you're Evicted you actually don't lose any points because you've you've now lost a player in your roster So you just kind of you just kind of get you lose your players You don't lose any points for that, but you do lose points for being nominated to be evicted. So you lose points there

Joe Tannenbaum (32:50.705)
Alright.

John T Bonaccorsi (32:54.575)
So every season there's probably about 30 different things that can happen that you either gain or lose points for.

Joe Tannenbaum (33:01.203)
Has Big Brother over the years thrown curve balls in that forced you to change your app, in terms of the format of the show or the way that the system works, where you were like, I need to now account for this new aspect of the game? Or, yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (33:15.565)
Oh yeah, mean, for sure. Joe, I live in fear. Let me tell you that. I'll tell you, the show premieres next week, so this conversation is very timely because Big Brother premieres next Thursday. And premiere night is always the most stressful night because they always do some kind of wacky twist in the beginning to get people engaged while they're watching, right? So...

Joe Tannenbaum (33:21.107)
You

Okay. Okay.

Joe Tannenbaum (33:35.781)
And you're rapidly typing, just like trying to figure out how to incorporate into the game.

John T Bonaccorsi (33:39.232)
I'm terrified because I'm like, what is this thing? What's the implication gonna be? Sometimes they'll have competitions where someone will win, but the show doesn't even tell you exactly what they've won yet.

So then I'm sitting there, I'm like, how do I point this? Like, I don't even know what this thing is yet. How many points is this worth if I don't know what this is? You know, sometimes they've done wacky stuff where like, you know, usually they've released the cast of the show a couple days before the premiere. Sometimes they'll release partially the cast and they'll be like, we're adding four people later. I'm like, well, people got to do their drafts now. Like, how do I deal with this problem? I mean...

Joe Tannenbaum (33:54.499)
Interesting, interesting.

Joe Tannenbaum (34:07.982)
Yeah, how does that work? What do you do in those situations?

John T Bonaccorsi (34:11.117)
I mean, luckily, know, typically what I've done, and it's luckily doesn't happen very often, but I'm in fear of it happening again next week, but like when it happens, I basically start the drafts early and I say, you know, it, whoever wants to do the draft now before they get at it, they can do one and then we'll add them after the premiere. And if people want to wait till after the premiere, they're welcome to, but like, unfortunately, my hands are a little bit tight. This is all in my, you know, all in my hands. So I just kind of roll with the punches as best as I can.

Joe Tannenbaum (34:31.834)
Hmm

John T Bonaccorsi (34:32.043)
But boy, it's definitely, I'm not in control of any of this stuff and it's not a consistent game year to year. Sometimes there's major structural changes. So I just try to make the system as flexible as possible so that I can kind of roll with it as it goes.

Joe Tannenbaum (34:42.94)
So like your point system must be like kind of fairly abstract so it can like just adapt to whatever's happening at any given time. I don't know. The fact that you're building a game around a game and you have no control over the base game is like a little stressful to me, but also very exciting because it's also a live, kind of a live internet moment, which doesn't really happen anymore as often as it used to. Right. So like people are

John T Bonaccorsi (34:57.911)
game.

Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (35:10.85)
Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (35:12.87)
watching it probably pretty live and then they are like tracking their own points and seeing how they're doing in their league pretty live. Like that's amazing. That's really, really cool.

John T Bonaccorsi (35:23.621)
Yeah, it's an interesting, it creates a lot of interesting problems for sure. Like it's, it's interesting, but that's why I love it. Because when I, when I built this and I keep saying me, I, I, I'm saying me because I'm one talking now, but my wife and I worked on this together. she's also a software engineer. and she's also a designer. So I've done all pretty much all of the coding, but my wife is a really talented designer and she's also really talented front end developer. So she did the original kind of UI designs for the app, which I get compliments all the time, all the time. It looks so much worse.

Joe Tannenbaum (35:38.938)
amazing. That's cool.

John T Bonaccorsi (35:53.418)
I did it. She's very, I'm a terrible designer, but she's great. And she also comes in occasionally when I'm like, this needs to look, this animation needs to look better on the homepage. She'll come in and work on that too. So anyway, I'm saying that, but yeah, the whole point why we kind of built this originally was like, I wanted to create like a fun-found experience for people. And like, you know, when you're watching the show.

Joe Tannenbaum (35:56.466)
You and me both.

Joe Tannenbaum (36:02.79)
Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (36:11.949)
The commercial comes on, you're opening up Twitter, you're seeing terrible things happening. You're like, man, the world sucks. And then you're like back to Big Brother. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool if on the commercial break, you could open your phone and do something related to the show. Like you could see like, dad won 10 points for this thing. now he's ahead of this person. He's like, that could be maybe something that would enrich the viewing experience rather than you falling into this like despair over like what's happening on the news. Right. So that was kind of the main driver originally was like, this would be fun, you know, for people to do.

Joe Tannenbaum (36:17.682)
Yep.

Joe Tannenbaum (36:25.745)
Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (36:33.682)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Tannenbaum (36:37.266)
100%.

Joe Tannenbaum (36:42.234)
So I saw, I think it's called, is it off read? Is that the company that is like the company that's behind this app? Is that you and your wife? That's awesome.

John T Bonaccorsi (36:51.925)
Yeah, so Offred, yes it is. Offred is an LLC that we have. The website is super outdated. It has stuff from eight years ago. It's really just a legal thing that we made to have an LLC. But yeah, all have them. But yeah, that's the company technically behind it. That's me and my wife together. we've worked on other projects over the years that have not really, most of them really haven't launched, but.

Joe Tannenbaum (37:02.224)
Yeah. We all have legal things that we made. Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (37:18.485)
This is the main one we focused on. But yeah, the idea was that this would be the kind of our product suite on Off-Rid.

Joe Tannenbaum (37:24.304)
I like it. I like it. So you have a relaunch of this coming up or digit. it already relaunched? Okay. What's new and exciting in the relaunch?

John T Bonaccorsi (37:30.356)
No, it'll launch next week.

John T Bonaccorsi (37:35.997)
So, biggest year yet because, and nobody knows this yet actually except for me and my wife really, so this is an exclusive for you Joe. Yeah, by the time this podcast, I don't know when this podcast will come out, but it'll probably, I assume, come out after the show starts. But if not, it's not a big deal. But it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. No, no, no, I mean, just like the people who listen to this probably don't watch Big Brother, so I'm not worried about fan overlap.

Joe Tannenbaum (37:43.842)
I'm getting a scoop right now.

Joe Tannenbaum (37:53.587)
I can if you want. can hold it if you doesn't... Nobody listens to this. Don't worry about it. I'm just kidding. You might be surprised. I mean, I might be in the outside group on this one, but anyway, so go ahead.

John T Bonaccorsi (38:06.925)
Oh, maybe. Yeah, yeah. So we are changing the name. So it's been Fantasy BB for the last seven years. We are rebranding this year as a as Tallydraft. So Tallydraft.com is going to be the new domain name. And the main purpose of the rebrand was that we're expanding to additional shows.

Joe Tannenbaum (38:13.906)
Okay.

Joe Tannenbaum (38:17.606)
Telly draft.

John T Bonaccorsi (38:27.377)
So, yeah, so one of the things that we've gotten from beginning from people literally seven years ago was like, this is great. Can I also use it for Survivor or The Challenge or whatever thousand other shows there are? So in the last nine months, I've basically spent the time.

Joe Tannenbaum (38:28.211)
amazing.

Joe Tannenbaum (38:39.217)
Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (38:43.045)
Refactoring the system to be it was built for really just one show and so I had to be architecting everything to be what I feature I call multi show which essentially now it can be You could have one for Survivor you could have one for Big Brother you could have one for the challenge Whatever it may be and we're starting with Survivor. We're gonna launch for Survivor 49, which I think premieres this fall And then you know, we'll see how that goes because I'm also having a baby in August. So it'd be tough to expand this thing right now But we're gonna see how it goes and I'm gonna just try with Survivor and you know the fans of Mass

Joe Tannenbaum (38:50.578)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Tannenbaum (39:01.66)
Amazing.

Joe Tannenbaum (39:07.012)
Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (39:12.629)
for that one specifically for a long time so we're gonna try that one out and you know if it goes terribly if it drives me crazy I'll just go back to Big Brother but my hope is that over time maybe it could expand to I watch a lot of tv so I can keep doing this for all kinds of shows.

Joe Tannenbaum (39:18.94)
Wait.

Joe Tannenbaum (39:24.496)
I mean, it seems like a good template to just sort of like shift over to other shows. it hard to rework the app to accommodate other shows? mean, at that point, you're just kind of like white labeling shows, it sounds like, ish.

John T Bonaccorsi (39:38.644)
Yeah, yeah, mean it was...

I say this, when I first built the app out, I made things as abstract as I could. like, you know, in Big Brother, the people who play the game are called house guests, but in the database, I just have them called contestants because that's more of a global thing. so even from the beginning, I kind of had an inkling that maybe one day this could happen, maybe. And so I tried to make things like as nasty as I could. So a lot of it actually wasn't too hard, but you know, I had to obviously redo the whole branding on it. can't be Big Brother focused branding anymore. I had to like, I wanted to make sure that like every time if you're using Survivor versus Big Brother, that the

Joe Tannenbaum (39:58.001)
Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (40:06.716)
Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (40:12.591)
entire app had a different color palette to reflect those shows. So that was an interesting experiment, tailwind, using the custom variable overrides and stuff like that for each show. So there was some front-end. Honestly, the challenges were mostly front-end based rather than back-end based.

Joe Tannenbaum (40:15.506)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Tannenbaum (40:21.041)
Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (40:26.192)
So you had kind of already architected it with that potentially in mind as you were building that initially-ish.

John T Bonaccorsi (40:31.693)
Yeah, I mean, didn't have the concept of shows, but that was kind of, I had the concept of like seasons, right? Because each show has seasons. And so was like, I had like a shows table and I had like a show ID called the season.

Joe Tannenbaum (40:38.204)
Right.

John T Bonaccorsi (40:43.309)
And a lot of it kind of trickled down from there because I built it in a way that was very abstractable. So I was like, oh, this is actually not that hard at all. The way harder part was like recording the new demo videos because I can't use the old layout anymore and it's not Big Brother focused. And so there was a lot of like outside work. But no, it wasn't too challenging overall, surprisingly considering compared to like things like time zones and stuff. wasn't too bad.

Joe Tannenbaum (40:45.233)
Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (40:54.523)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Tannenbaum (41:04.134)
so, so you're expanding out. I, like, if I signed up for the site, I can have a league that's related to any of the shows that you offer. Like that's the way it's going to be now. Like I don't need separate accounts. It's one site for all the leagues that I have. And then the branding changes, depending on like the view that I'm in. Is that kind of it?

John T Bonaccorsi (41:20.937)
Yeah, it'll be like, yeah, that's right. I mean, it'll be like bigbrother.telegraph.com, survivor.telegraph.com. So we use these like subdomains to divide it up. So whenever one year on, we pick up like, you're on the big brother subdomain, let's make it blue, you're on Survivor, let's make it green.

Joe Tannenbaum (41:27.644)
Gotcha.

Joe Tannenbaum (41:35.748)
Is it the same accounts though you're using the same accounts for both? Yeah. Beautiful. That's awesome.

John T Bonaccorsi (41:37.855)
All the same database, all the same accounts. So it's one login, everything like that. And your leaks will be, they're all in the same database. So it's all really the same, but we kind of just like hide things based on where you are. So yeah, it's pretty straightforward and I'm hoping that people really like it when it comes out.

Joe Tannenbaum (41:52.145)
That's, I think it's a great idea not to sell you this with capitalism, but are you ever planning on monetizing this?

John T Bonaccorsi (41:57.678)
Man, it's a tough question. mean, so the flat answer is that I've always wanted to make sure that no matter what happens with this thing long term that...

people and their families can sign up and play this for free in some way, or form. So like, never want it to be like, I want to play this game with my grandma. Oh, it's $2. Like that's, you know, that's annoying. So it'll always be what it is now. I hope it's always, I want it to always be free. Is there a chance that in the future I could add some paid features or something like that? Maybe. Yeah, I've considered it.

Joe Tannenbaum (42:10.768)
Yep. Yep.

Joe Tannenbaum (42:28.38)
Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (42:30.285)
But I don't even have any ads on there right now. This thing makes no money. It could probably make some decent money because it has a lot of visitors on it. I've never put ads on there. I've never charged for anything. I just, to me, it's like if you're trying to play something with your mom and your dad and your sister or whatever, and then you go on and it's like ads everywhere and it's, oh, I have to pay a dollar 99 or whatever. I just thought like, I wanted to keep it as simple and as clean as I could. And really just for like the love of the game. Like it's really truly like a passion thing for me where it's like, it was, was my gift to like the

Joe Tannenbaum (42:36.262)
But.

Joe Tannenbaum (42:51.132)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Tannenbaum (42:58.372)
I love it.

John T Bonaccorsi (43:00.239)
fan community. And so I didn't want to take out the wall at that point. And so could things change at one point? Maybe or maybe if it got too much, I would just shut it down or something. I don't know what would happen, but right now it's free and it will be free for the foreseeable future.

Joe Tannenbaum (43:13.574)
That's the right answer. That was a trick question and you did it. And I'm just kidding. No, I mean, it's, you know, I feel like once you get to that number of users, gets, I'll speak for my own, but like it seems tempting to be like, how can I at least let it pay for itself? Or like, how can I cover costs or, you Yeah. Fascinating. Fascinating. Anything else you want to tell me about this project? I mean, like it's.

John T Bonaccorsi (43:17.549)
Ha

Joe Tannenbaum (43:41.668)
It's a pretty fascinating project. would imagine like the data structure is sort of interesting. The interaction is pretty interesting. Like I it's, it's a cool project. is there anything that we missed that you want to touch on?

John T Bonaccorsi (43:56.078)
Let me think. We covered drafts. There's a ton of things that are involved in it. Like I mentioned, the swap system. There's also a trading system. So you can propose trades between players. If you have person A and I, person B, and I want to swap them or whatever, trade them essentially. You can do that. And there's interesting stuff there because everything is really based on time. who had this person at this given point in time to determine who gets the points.

Joe Tannenbaum (44:11.731)
Right.

Joe Tannenbaum (44:22.787)
yeah!

John T Bonaccorsi (44:23.789)
Yeah, that's complicated, Because there's like historical stuff too where you can go back, you could trade maybe even midweek or something, then who gets the, so you gotta figure all that out. There's some interesting stuff there too.

Joe Tannenbaum (44:31.001)
Well, like, okay, can I if I'm in New York and my friend is in California and I watch the show and then propose a trade, can I do that? Like trade before they've seen the show basically? Or is there like a dark period where you can't trade?

John T Bonaccorsi (44:43.691)
So

So that's, this is so interesting. There's a whole other like thing here, which is that one of the things that was tough was that I had to, when I was thinking about this, I had to think about like how this thing is actually very different from football. And with football you can do, think like midweek trades and stuff like that doesn't matter. But with this one, you know, the episodes air three times a week. So, and there's also the live feed. Yeah, it's thrown three times a week. And then there's also the live feed component. So there's some people who know things way in advance because they're watching the live feeds on the internet. So they see what's happening in the show.

Joe Tannenbaum (45:03.795)
Joe Tannenbaum (45:13.68)
you mean like a live feed of the house?

John T Bonaccorsi (45:15.469)
a live fee 24 7 in the house. You can come in anytime. So so there's things to consider there. But basically with the way with like things and trades and swaps work, I basically process them all at the end of the week. So like after somebody gets evicted from the house, there's some cute jobs that run that basically process all the trades and all the swaps and move people around in the rosters. And that's to basically kind of as a safety guard so that someone who is watching the feeds doesn't make a trade based on some of the

Joe Tannenbaum (45:21.873)
my god.

John T Bonaccorsi (45:45.416)
knows about the win something, you and then it gets, you you trick somebody who isn't watching the feeds. and the beautiful thing about that is that even though technically that trade is getting processed, like at the end of the, you know, eviction at like maybe 9 PM Eastern, based on all the other time zone logic we're doing, the people who are watching in California, they don't see it yet. It doesn't, when they come onto the app, it still looks like they have that player and the points haven't happened yet. So they don't see who got what. And so because everything is so calculated based on where you are and where you're watching from,

Joe Tannenbaum (45:46.835)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Tannenbaum (46:04.24)
Right.

John T Bonaccorsi (46:15.391)
It all kind of works even though things are technically different behind the scenes. Literally almost everything in this app that's important is time-based. It's really critical to me.

Joe Tannenbaum (46:24.625)
That's fascinating. That's a really specific challenge. That's really interesting. crazy. Okay. Well, we're at about the 45 minute mark. this was awesome. And I, I kind of, you know, I think maybe when you relaunch and like, you get into it, we can check back in and see how it's working and like what the challenges have been and like, you know, if, it'll stick around. So.

John T Bonaccorsi (46:27.17)
Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (46:31.509)
Yeah. Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (46:38.573)
Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (46:53.09)
Yeah.

Joe Tannenbaum (46:54.063)
Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people find you? Where do want to point them on the internet?

John T Bonaccorsi (47:00.557)
Yeah, they don't have to find me. It's okay. I'm on Blue Sky and stuff, but who cares? Don't look for me. Don't follow me. You're not gonna like it. You know, it's fine. If you like Big Brother... okay, good. I'm glad you like it. It's just for you. I just tweet for you. That's all it is. No, I mean, look, if you're into Big Brother or Survivor, check out teledrap.com when it comes out and, you know, do a round. Let me know if you have any feedback and stuff like that. But yeah, otherwise, Joe, thanks for having me. Hey, I gotta ask you a question.

Joe Tannenbaum (47:02.447)
Okay, don't even look for him. Don't do it. John's a good, John's a good follow. John's a good follow. I enjoy following John. Yeah, yeah. Perfect. Great.

Joe Tannenbaum (47:27.719)
Yeah.

John T Bonaccorsi (47:27.793)
I feel like the person who's always throwing people surprise parties, they want a surprise party themselves. so listening to this podcast, when are you going to talk about, who's going to talk to you about what's going on in your side of projects?

Joe Tannenbaum (47:39.823)
that's a good question. I actually, I actually have one that I'm working on that is I've been dogfooding for a while now. And I was like, you know, just have a conversation with myself about this project. So I might recruit somebody to just be like, can you just ask me questions about this on my own podcast? Yeah, we'll see. I was thinking about that literally yesterday.

John T Bonaccorsi (47:43.053)
You should do it, man.

John T Bonaccorsi (47:52.866)
yourself.

do it. Yeah.

I mean, as a listener, I've been like, when's Joe gonna talk about his stuff, you know? So I'd be curious to hear it.

Joe Tannenbaum (48:06.265)
All right. I mean, these days I don't have a lot of time for side products between kid and job, but I do have one that's cooking that's been fun. So, and it's been successful and for myself. So we'll see if I decide to put it out to more people. Yeah. Okay. I'll keep you posted. Dude, thank you so much. Pleasure having you on.

John T Bonaccorsi (48:20.205)
Okay, I'd love to see it. Thanks, man.

John T Bonaccorsi (48:28.257)
Pleasure. Thanks Joe. Appreciate it.