Capstone — the deployed app

Level 5 · Capstone

The deployed Lions analytics app

This is the only capstone with no notebook scaffold. The deliverable is the deployed system. The Phase 0 scaffold already lives at app/ in this repo, with a FastAPI service in data/. Your job is to turn the scaffold into something a stranger could land on and learn something from.

Minimum viable launch (week 13)

A single working slice. Resist the urge to ship five charts at once.

• One page: /charts with the 2024 weekly scoring + WR room + 4th-down decision view (all three are already wired).
• One data refresh: GitHub Actions cron that runs the loader Tuesday mornings.
• One env: Neon Postgres, Fly.io FastAPI, Vercel for the Next.js app.
• Live URL: app.1pride.app resolves, loads in under 2 seconds, looks good on a phone.

That’s the bar. Polish comes after.

Required pieces

1. Public GitHub repo with clean commit history. Don’t squash the journey out.
2. README at the root of app/ that a stranger could fork and run locally in under 10 minutes.
3. /api/health endpoint returns 200 even when Postgres is down (just without DB info). The frontend should degrade gracefully.
4. Data source caption on every chart. “Source: nflverse.”
5. No NFL marks. No Lions logo, no NFL shield, no broadcast imagery. Stats and player names are fine; logos and team art are not.

Stretch deliverables

After the MVP ships:

• Multi-team selector. The data layer already supports any team — expose it in the UI.
• A 4th-down what-if calculator powered by the L3 capstone model.
• A draft pick projection table powered by the L4 capstone model.
• Sparklines on the WR room showing each receiver’s per-week yardage.
• A “freshness” footer sourced from the load-status endpoint (L5 Lesson 3).

Evaluation criteria

• Live URL loads in under 2 seconds on a cold cache
• Public repo with README, license, and a meaningful commit history
• README a stranger could fork and run in under 10 minutes
• Every chart has title + axes + source caption
• Source caption is correct (nflverse, not “NFL.com”)
• The app uses real data, not hard-coded numbers
• Lighthouse scores: performance > 90, accessibility > 90

What this looks like in your portfolio

Resume bullet:

Shipped app.1pride.app — a public Lions analytics app built end to end: nflverse data → Postgres ETL → FastAPI service → Next.js UI → deployed to Vercel. Public repo, scheduled weekly data refresh, four seasons of play-by-play data backing every chart.

LinkedIn post:

14 weeks ago I started a self-paced data curriculum on real Lions data. Today it shipped: app.1pride.app. Five levels from SELECT to deployed ML, all open source, all running on real nflverse data going back to 2021.

The point of the L5 capstone is not the chart. It’s the URL.