Echecs France

Echecs France is the easiest way to find local chess tournaments and clubs in France.

Built With

NextJS | TypeScript | Leaflet | Tailwind | Python | Docker

The Brief

When I first moved to France, I wanted to find a way to find chess tournaments in my area, but my geography of the country was poor. The Fédération Française des Échecs shows upcoming tournaments in a list format, which is not useful at all for people like me.

I aimed to create a website that would allow people to find chess tournaments on an interactive map of France.

Method

The initial prototype for this was written in Python and Flask. After a few iterations, I decided to rewrite it in NextJS and TypeScript, taking advantage of Leaflet for the map.

Data acquisition is done via a series of Python applications that I wrote. Upcoming tournament addresses are then accurately geolocated via the Google Maps API, and the coordinates along with all relevant information are stored in MongoDB. The main web application reads this database and populates the coordinates as pins on the map.

Learning Opportunities

Not long after this project was deployed, another developer submitted a pull request with a new feature. This person has been a long standing contributor and maintainer of Echecs France ever since.

Thanks to this developer’s decades of experience, my own learning process was accelerated. I believe that I have learned more from working on this project than any other, thanks to me wanting to bring my code up to the same standard as the rest of the project.