About

Pro Horse Race Tips is a website featuring betting tips on Australian horse racing. I was asked to add multiple features to this website, such as: a user database, storing and displaying data from multiple data sources and then running a proprietary algorithm to make race predictions.

Challenges

One of the biggest challenges was working on a shared hosting platform. The client just signed a new 3 year contract and did not want to move the site to a dedicated host. This presented a problem when It came to updating the database with new details (which are pushed out several times a day from the data feed vendors), due to the size of the database and how large calculations had to be re-run on all the rows to make the predictions, it would cause high CPU usage and the host would kill the worker processes. After optimizing and caching the calculations as much as possible, we decided to run the calculations off-site and push the data as a backup to the website when completed.

Technology

Screenshots and Features

This is the home screen of the website.

I had to add features such as user login and registration and make a custom lightbox that gave the site a cohesive look and feel.

The information from the datasets is shown, organizing future races.

The user has to be registered and logged in to see the race predictions. The predictions use data from the horses previous runs and predict the race duration for different track types.

All of the race data is linked and displayed in a structured format. Users can also see which races influenced the race predictions.