Two weeks of work, mostly behind the scenes

Shipped to production

Work that is live and running right now.

A new product: the dealer tablet

• Built a dealer tablet app from nothing to demo-ready in about 36 hours, now live at dealer.tblmaster.app and running on a real tablet in a kiosk browser. This is an entirely new surface for the business. It did not exist two weeks ago.
• A tablet pairs to a table with a 6-character code and identifies itself as a device, without anyone logging in. Dealers rotate constantly. The tablet belongs to the table, not to a person.
• Dealers sign in with a 4-digit PIN, so every action in the log is attributed to a named person and a shift change is one tap. Accountability without making a dealer type a full password every 30 minutes.
• Seat-first actions: tap an occupied seat to move or vacate a player, tap an empty one to seat the next person off the waitlist.
• Service buttons require a deliberate press-and-hold with a progress ring, and acknowledgements come back in about a second with the name of whoever responded. A player brushing against the tablet cannot page the floor by accident.
• A live tournament surface with a view-only clock, where seat taps offer bust and move only. Product decision: a dealer never rebuys a player at the table. Rebuys stay at the cashier window.
• The tablet renders each room's own table theme - felt, rail, and logo pulled from that room's configuration.

Leaderboards, end to end

• A complete leaderboard system shipped across six surfaces in roughly 48 hours: the public website, the operator tools, the in-room TVs, the embeddable widgets, the mobile app, and admin.
• Points are now awarded automatically when a player finishes in the money, alongside the recorded payout.
• Staff can adjust points with a required reason, and adjustments are append-only and audited - they can be voided but never deleted.
• Privacy opt-outs now propagate in seconds rather than taking up to a day.
• Seeded a realistic demo history - 264 finalized tournaments across 6 rooms going back to February, so the boards look real in a demo.

The public site (DirtyStackPoker.com)

• Most of the visual overhaul is complete, with the rest landing this week: one consistent page width sitewide, the ad layout reworked, hero images removed, nav locked, and the rooms, tournaments, and cash pages rebuilt. The old full-bleed layout was causing sideways scrolling on tablets.
• The Rail is a real blog now - article pages, tags, reading time, and comments where anyone can read but only signed-in players can post. Eight posts and 21 comments seeded, with original cover art for all eight.
• A coaches directory with profiles, filters, and verified badges, wired to a $50/year Stripe plan that bundles coach access and an ad-free experience. First real revenue mechanism on the site. Currently in test mode.
• The US privacy opt-out ("Your Privacy Choices") including honoring the browser's Global Privacy Control signal - built in-house, no third-party consent vendor, no cookie wall.
• Region handling rebuilt on one principle: detect once, show once, change once. Visitors outside our coverage now get an explicit region picker instead of being silently shown Florida.
• A signed-in player's home region now follows them from their profile, and can be edited from the mobile app.
• A typography consistency pass that found a heading weight being faked by the browser and a stray font falling back to whatever the visitor's computer had. Documented in a shareable guide.

The DirtyStack Invitational

• The tour page is merged and on production behind a coming-soon gate, for our first live event: Saturday September 26, 2026 at One-Eyed Jacks in Sarasota. Buy-in, structure, and times render as intentional "announcing soon" states, so the page can go public before those are locked.
• dsptour.com is live with a signup form, spam protection, rate limiting, and a branded confirmation email. Built capture-first: if the email fails to send, the signup is still never lost.
• A scroll-scrubbed cinematic flight demo was built and deployed as a separate preview - a four-leg camera move through a poker room that scrubs as you scroll.

Operator tooling (roomdirector.com)

• A three-wave cleanup driven by actually using the product, not by working a backlog. Fake data and stale copy removed, dead tabs hidden, broken links fixed.
• A one-click launcher that puts a tournament on the big screen, and a champion celebration overlay when an event is finalized.
• Guard rails against real mistakes: closing a table with players still seated now warns and names them, rather than silently vanishing them from the floor.
• Self-serve embed generator so a room can add our live widgets to their own website without us doing anything.
• The room app got its first CI pipeline and 33 new regression tests. It had none before.

New capability: market intelligence

Two weeks ago this was a spreadsheet of poker rooms. It is now an automated national dataset that refreshes itself every night.

• 485 poker rooms confirmed across 41 states, verified against an authoritative source and reconciled against our existing list of 1,063. Nine states genuinely have no poker.
• 9,510 tournaments now tracked across 37 states, refreshed nightly, with game type, format, and buy-in derived automatically.
• A continuous 34-day record of actual attendance - how many people really showed up, not just what was scheduled. This is the number nobody else has.
• Three overnight jobs do all of it - attendance at 1am, Florida at 2am, the national sweep at 3am - and they run at zero AI cost, using local models on the Mac rather than a paid service.
• An interactive report with a day-by-hour heatmap of when tournaments actually run, filterable by state, buy-in, and date.
• An AI analyst you can ask questions in plain English, scoped so it only answers from our data and cannot invent numbers. It correctly caught, unprompted, that One-Eyed Jacks skips noon on Saturdays.

The company's data is now backed up

None of this is visible in the product, and it is probably the most important two weeks' work on this list.

Every night, automatically

• The entire production database, all file storage, and all 22 server-side functions copy themselves to a machine in the office at 3:30 every morning. Nobody touches anything. Verified this morning: 99 tables, 415 files, 22 of 22 functions, no errors. The last 30 nights are kept.
• A Synology NAS with two 6TB drives mirrored, so either drive can fail without data loss. It sits behind a UPS, wired to talk to it - so the NAS is told the moment there is a power problem rather than just losing power mid-write.
• The Mac backs up to it hourly, the Windows laptop images itself nightly, and phone photos back up independently of iCloud.
• Ransomware-resistant snapshots with a 7-day lock that cannot be altered even by an administrator.
• A private file-sync between both machines - our own Dropbox equivalent, with 32-version history.

The machine behind it

• The Mac Studio replaced the Windows laptop as the primary development machine, with everything migrated across rather than restarted. The real win is that it is always on. The old data-collection jobs only ran while a laptop was open and logged in. That constraint is gone.
• A month of accumulated poker data was carried over and reconciled, not thrown away and re-collected.
• A local archive of AI model weights - about 369GB - copied to the NAS, so the tools keep working regardless of what happens upstream.