The Product

Avid Gaming has its own sportsbook platform providing online sports betting for sports fans in Canada, with a huge range of bets available. The site features both pre-match and live betting, with real time updates of odds, prices, scores and other live game data. We also offer online casino game play and poker tables and tournaments through partner integrations.

Behind the scenes the tech team supports the different other teams in the office in different ways. We provide sports-feeds from multiple suppliers to our odds traders, payments processing features such as AML, KYC, age and identity verification to our compliance and customer service teams, and promotional and bonusing functionality to our marketing teams.

Technology

Our software is built using Ruby on Rails and our web front end is based on Vue.js. Our applications run on Phusion Passenger and Sidekiq on Linux. We use Redis for caching and queueing and MS SQL Server database servers.

Systems including New Relic and Rollbar are used to monitor our applications, and we use Gitlab to manage our source and CI deployment. We generally use the latest versions of the software available.

Autonomy

Our developer and testers work day-to-day in small feature teams, and additionally are members of their particular technology team. We have a very flat structure and decisions on project coding are made at feature-team level where everyone has a say in how features are implemented. Decisions on technology direction or architecture are made at technology-team level and again everyone has a say. Bigger decisions may be decided by running spikes or proof-of-concept mini-projects.

Process

We run a Lean and Agile development process that features:

• •  High collaboration between developers, testers and business stakeholders
• •  High collaboration between UX designers and developers
• •  Very little project management overhead
• •  Continuous delivery – we deploy many times per day to production
• •  Just in time specification of requirements
• •  High degree of automation (CI, deployment, etc., and good test coverage)
• •  Peer-reviewed code changes
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Learning

Technology is always evolving and we encourage personal development. We have a wide range of project types and a very broad range of skills across the group, and you’ll find teammates are happy to help and to share their knowledge as you encounter areas new to you.  We encourage developers to learn outside of their current specialisation and we support them doing this if they wish. Learning is primarily driven by the individual’s own goals and we are happy to support developers in this, by allowing time, books, etc. We occasionally arrange courses for whole teams on subjects of general interest, such as secure coding practices.

Codebase

Most of our codebase is young as we have recently migrated our system from Cold Fusion to Ruby on Rails with Vue.js.

We value clear code and allow time to refactor while implementing business projects.

Project work

There are always new features to implement. Example of recent or up-coming projects are:

• •  A feature where, in the time between placing a bet on a sports event and before the result is known, a bettor can “cash out” by closing the bet early and receiving a payout based on the current odds, rather than waiting until the end of the event.
• •  Using web sockets to send odds updates directly to the browser, thus improving usability and performance.
• •  A Front End Design System to help standardise components of our user interface, increase efficiency between designers and developers, and make it easier for back end developers to work on the front end.
• •  Working on and taking ownership of the Rails adapter for SQL Server as an open-source contribution.
• •  A new promotions area where customer can see promotions available to them and can view their progress on bonus offers they have taken.
• •  Free bets where our marketing teams can offer free bets or bet credits.
• •  Continuous incremental improvements in user experience, all with the intention of making our products easier to use.
• •  Payments to provide more options to customers.
• •  Automated identity document scanning and parsing for fraud detection and efficiency using Jumio.
• •  Supporting multiple straight bets on our bet card.

Collaboration and Teamwork

We’re a medium sized company with a small company feel, in that we collaborate and cooperate very well across all departments.

Before COVID-19 our Design and UX team sat beside our developers in the Dublin office and the front end developers and designers continue to work closely together

Each feature team, which is make up a mix of development and QA skills, meets daily for a stand-up and communicate throughout the day on Slack, Zoom, or Skype

We work regularly and chat with business stakeholders and others based normally in our offices in Jersey, Kahnawake, and Dublin.