Street Lines - Your Go To Sports Lines & Player Props

Project Overview:

Street Lines is a dynamic React Single Page Application (SPA) designed to provide users with real time access to the latest sports betting odds and lines. This project demonstrates expertise in frontend web development, including translating complex UI mockups into a functional, responsive application, managing real time data streams, and implementing robust data sorting and filtering capabilities. It highlights a commitment to delivering high quality, data intensive applications tailored to user needs in the betting information space.

Goals & Objectives:

The primary objective was to develop a reliable platform delivering timely and accurate betting information to enhance user decision-making. Key technical goals included building a highly responsive interface for seamless use across devices, implementing efficient data fetching and sorting mechanisms for large datasets (including specific player props), integrating Google Analytics for user behavior insights, and ensuring the clarity and accuracy of presented odds.

Approach & Process:

Requirements & Design: Initiated the project by defining requirements based on user needs (personas) and client goals. Translated UI mockups into a concrete development plan, prioritizing features and establishing a modern, intuitive design language.
Development: Built the React SPA utilizing agile development principles. Focused on creating reusable components, managing application state effectively, and integrating with data sources or APIs to fetch and display real time odds. Implemented dynamic data tables with user controlled sorting.
Testing & Iteration: Conducted user interviews and usability testing throughout the development cycle. Gathered qualitative feedback to iteratively refine the user interface, data presentation, and overall workflow, ensuring the application met user expectations.
Launch & Maintenance: Executed a seamless deployment of the application to a live environment. Currently manage ongoing hosting and maintenance, monitoring performance and ensuring continued availability for its user base worldwide.

Outcome & Impact:

The application successfully scaled to support over 1,000 recurring daily users, demonstrating robust performance and significant user adoption. Post launch surveys indicated high satisfaction, with 95% of respondents providing positive feedback on the platform's utility and design. Street Lines proved highly effective in delivering valuable, up to date betting information, achieving its core objective of empowering users with timely data.

Questions I get a lot.

Why go back for a CS degree if you were already at $170k?

Because the work had already outrun the paperwork, and I was tired of that gap. I’d walked away from two schools already — Baruch didn’t even offer a CS degree, and by BMCC I was already writing production code, so sitting through intro classes for a piece of paper felt backwards. I enrolled at WGU in 2024, kept the full-time engineering job, and finished the B.S. in August 2026. Third school. First degree, eight years later than the “normal” path. I wanted the foundation, and I wanted to close a loop I’d left open twice.

How did you get hired without a degree?

I showed work. The first scripts were for my dad’s business in 2017, automating the data entry that was eating his week. Columbia’s coding bootcamp gave me three months of full-stack JavaScript and a cohort in 2019 — a program that doesn’t even exist anymore. PLNETWORKS hired me in 2020 on a portfolio, not a diploma. After that, each role was about what I’d already shipped: production bugs, HIPAA software, storefronts. The degree came eight years later. It didn’t open the first door.

What actually moved compensation from $75k to $170k?

Two years of shipping at PLNETWORKS, then a move to Cazton that roughly doubled it, then BrightInsight in 2022 — HIPAA-regulated software at $170k. Same skills, different rooms. The market paid for proof. I treated interviews like case studies of work I’d already done, not like a plea for a first chance.

Where are you from, and where are you now?

I was raised in Jamaica, Queens. First thirteen years in an attic. I live in Hell’s Kitchen now. The city didn’t get bigger. I just moved west of the same story.

How do you actually use Cursor and Claude?

As a tutor and a pair, not as a ghostwriter. I still read the diff. I still throw away the parts that look clever and aren’t. The tools make the boring parts faster so I can spend the hours on the decisions that have to be mine.

What would you tell someone learning to code right now?

Build something your family can use. Put it in public. Don’t wait for a school to bless the start. I dropped out twice, then finished. Both of those were the right call at the time.