Motivation
Tourny was born out of a desire for me and my brother to learn new skills and work together to build something tangible that can be used by others in the future.
We decided on building tournament management software for sports. Our goal is to help streamline the planning and management of tournaments for those who are less knowledgeable.
We have experience growing up around sports, casual and competitive, which provides us with an abundance of knowledge of the domain. We also know many friends and family who are teachers and coaches that can benefit from this software.
Design Process
Initially relied on knowledge of web development and experience playing sports competitively to guide the creation of preliminary designs. Worked on building a design system and reusable components to streamline the design process and utilized this in prototypes that helped us gather feedback.
Enjoyed many hours pouring over interfaces, fonts and logos. It is incredibly rewarding to go back to old designs and see how the iterations of feedback have improved the intuitiveness and look of the product.
Development
In the early development of Tourny we used Vite with React, Chakra UI as a component library and styling system and Apollo as the GraphQL client. Over time we have moved to using NextJS to leverage its SSR capabilities for SEO and link previews, Tailwind for more flexibility and control over styling and URQL as it is a more lightweight GraphQL client.
A highlight of the development environment is using GraphQL Codegen to generate React hooks and Typescript types based off of our API for our frontend queries and mutations. On the backend we use Prisma with a PostgreSQL database.
