Okay, so today I wanted to mess around with getting some data on Olympic volleyball results. Nothing too fancy, just wanted to see how easy it would be to pull the information together.
Getting Started
First, I needed to find a place to get the data. I started by just searching on the web and quickly realized that there is lots of info around Olympic results. I just picked one source that looked okay and decided to run with it.
Pulling the Data
I decided to just manually grab the info. Here’s a bit of what I collected, just to give you an idea:
- Year: 2020 (played in 2021)
- Men’s Gold: France
- Men’s Silver: ROC (Russian Olympic Committee)
- Men’s Bronze: Argentina
- Year: 2020 (played in 2021)
- Women’s Gold: United States
- Women’s Silver: Brazil
- Women’s Bronze: Serbia
I did this for a few different Olympics, just copying and pasting. It wasn’t the most efficient, I know, but I wanted a quick and dirty way to do it.
Putting it Together
After I had a bit of data, I just put it into a simple text file. No databases or anything like that, just a simple list. I played around putting the results into different ordering like this.
- 2020 – Men’s: France (Gold), ROC (Silver), Argentina (Bronze)
- 2020 – Women’s: United States(Gold), Brazil (Silver), Serbia (Bronze)
What I Learned
The main thing I realized is that there’s a TON of data out there. I could spend all day just gathering results! It also made me think about how much better it would be to automate this. Copying and pasting is fine for a little bit, but it gets old fast. Maybe next time, I’ll try using Python or something to grab the data automatically. That would be way more efficient. Anyway, that’s my little data experiment for the day!
