If you don’t know me then this will seem to come out of nowhere. I made a thing that tells you the results of NHL games (to Brits, that’s the American/Canadian ice hockey league) without telling you the scores.
Basically, I’m a fan of the Pittsburgh Penguins, but I can’t watch these games live most of the time. They tend to start at midnight UK time, and go on until at least 3am. I can’t do that, I like sleep.

So I watch the game later in the day. But if the Pens lost, I feel like I sort of wasted my time. It was depressing, and I could have found out beforehand that they lost. Lately I’ve been checking the scores, then watching the game if the Pens won.

Further dilemma – this sort of ruins the excitement. I now know exactly how many goals are scored. If that is the score at the end of the first period is there really any point in watching the rest of the game?

Like any normal programmer, I thought about asking a friend to check the result for me and to tell me if the Pens won or lost. But that seemed rather inefficient. Instead, why not have a COMPUTER look up the result for me, compare the two scores, and tell me what’s up? Great idea.

So the end result is this, which is written in PHP on Google’s App Engine:

http://nhlspoilerfreeresults.appspot.com/

If you’re an NHL fan, enjoy! And if you’re not, then maybe pull a slightly bemused face at the bizarre ways I spend my free time.