Okay, so, Fiorentina standings, right? Let’s talk about how I got into tracking that. It wasn’t some grand plan, more like a slow burn. I’m a pretty big football fan, always have been, and Fiorentina’s my team, been following them for years.
Initially, it was just checking scores on my phone after matches. You know, the usual stuff. Then, I started getting into comparing their results week to week. I’d jot down the wins, losses, draws – a real messy notebook affair at first.
That got old fast. My notes were all over the place, impossible to make sense of after a few weeks. So I upgraded, went digital. I created a simple spreadsheet. Nothing fancy. Just columns for date, opponent, result, and goals scored. I entered everything manually, at first. It was tedious, but I was keeping track – much better than the notebook.
But even that got cumbersome. I was spending way too much time manually entering data. This is where things got interesting, and I started looking for a better way.
- Phase 2: Finding Data Sources: I started hunting for websites and APIs that provided Fiorentina’s match results and standings. It took some digging, believe me. Some sites were clunky, others were just plain unreliable. Eventually, I found a few that were consistent and reasonably up to date.
- Phase 3: Scripting: This is where my coding skills came in handy. I’m not a pro programmer, but I’m reasonably comfortable with Python. I wrote a simple script to scrape the data from the websites I found reliable. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. It automatically pulled the match data and updated my spreadsheet. It saved me a ton of time.
- Phase 4: Refinement: The initial script was rough around the edges. It needed error handling – sometimes the websites would be down or the data would be formatted differently. I spent a good amount of time tweaking the script, adding error checks and cleaning up the code. I also started adding some basic analysis – calculating points, goal differences etc., directly within the script.
- Phase 5: Visualization: Once I had the data clean and organized, I started visualizing it. Nothing too advanced. Initially, it was simple charts in the spreadsheet itself. Then I explored some Python libraries to create more visually appealing charts and graphs showing Fiorentina’s progress throughout the season. That helped me get a much clearer picture of their performance and identify trends.
And that’s pretty much it. From a messy notebook to automated data collection and visualization. It’s been a fun project, a great way to combine my love of football with my interest in programming. I’m still tweaking and improving the whole system, but I’m pretty happy with how far it’s come. Now, if only Fiorentina would start winning more games!
