Features:
* Follow team(s) or stadium(s)
* Notifications: 7 days before, night before, matchday, kick-off, and when crowds start clearing
* "Set it and forget it" - the app keeps you in the loop
* Countdown to next home game, recent results, fixture list, league table
* No ads, no tracking, no account required
* Free for now (might add a small fee later)
Why I built it:
I wanted this for myself, needed a side project, and initially thought I'd use it to improve my C#. But I switched to Perl, which runs faster and simpler than .NET Core on the Raspberry Pi 3B I'm using to self-host the backend. I used Amazon Q in VS Code to scaffold the frontend (HTML/CSS/JS), but most of the backend is hand-written Perl. Notifications are sent via Firebase Cloud Messaging, triggered by cron jobs that hit the football-data.org API. The mobile app is a Capacitor wrapper of the web app.
Lessons learned so far:
* Amazon Q was great for scaffolding UI, less so for backend build scripts and cron workflows
* The value is mostly for locals who want to avoid matchday crowds (not so much for fans)
* In big cities, football is only part of the picture - expanding to cover more events would make it more useful
Would love feedback on the app, the positioning, or the tech stack. Also open to ideas for expanding it beyond football.
(Edited to address formatting, apologies, very first contribution to HN)