hots.dog

hots.dog was a Heroes of the Storm online stats aggregator.

It used community-sourced game uploads, processed them into a database, and allowed for pleasant viewing of cohort summaries. I shut it down when Blizzard ended the eSports support of the game because I stopped playing at that time, and I chose not to continue running a site that did not benefit me.

Innovations

The primary motivation for me was I didn't like the existing stats site HOTSlogs, and thought I could make a better experience.

Table Sorting

I wanted excellent table sorting. When viewing stats on these sites you click around a bunch of tables. I made a react table sorter that:

• remembers your most recent column sort preference so on next load it's still there
• sorts all similar tables the same (you click a column on one table and it updates all the other similar tables with the same sort, works across pages too)
• can configure sort direction on first click (i.e., first click on a name column should sort a -> z, first click on most number columns sort highest to lowest)

Game Parsing

I wrote a Go program that would read out the on-disk game files and extract images and talent text that I could dump into the database. No tedious manual text entry. It included an expression evaluator for the internal equations that calculate how talents change over levels.