sga

I'm taking a train with some startup folks from Ontario [http://trips.threefortynine.com/] to the International Startup Festival in Montreal [http://startupfestival.com/en/], July 11-13, 2012. I'm curious who from the HN community is planning to attend, where you're coming from, and what your startup is if you have one.

Background: In learning to program well and step beyond a beginner or novice level I think there exists a chasm. The web is filled with great resources for learning new languages but moving past the initial level that these resources help you achieve is tough. I see two current methods for self improvement:

(1) work with others who are more experienced and through osmosis you begin to pick up aspects of their developmental style and process i.e. how to approach a project and ultimately implement a solution (this is not possible for those that don't program for a living);

(2) hack on your own and through trial and error eventually find your way (good but perhaps not the best or only alternative).

Concept: I'm proposing a third option or hoping if it already exists. I would find it incredibly helpful if there were a resource that detailed the thought process and implementation steps that an experienced developer took in approaching a set of problems or projects. Even better I'd love to see two developers independently approach a set of small to medium sized projects, detail their thoughts along the way, and see how their development process and their implementations differ.

What do you think? Valuable? Does it exist? Worth creating?

This is a long standing question of mine reignited by bignoggins post at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772224 where he described the success of http://www.fantasymonsterapp.com.

I've often thought of building sports related apps (esp. pertaining to fantasy sports) but I've always struggled with how to legally obtain the necessary data (scheduling, statistics, player images, team logos, etc.) such that I can pursue it as a commercial venture. An obvious solution is to simply scrape the info but I'd assume you'd get shut down or blocked rather quickly. Yahoo offers a Fantasy Sports API but it's to be used for non-commercial purposes only.

Can anyone shed light on where/how to obtain current and past sports data that is available for commercial use? (I'm most interested in NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL data)

Thanks!