Enterprise infrastructure, no data hoarding, and a decade of engineering behind Elite Ice

If you've never heard of me before opening this app, that's fair. It's part of why I wanted to write this. A free app with live scores is easy to be sceptical of. Who's really behind it? What are they doing with my phone? Is it going to vanish the moment it gets popular? Those are fair questions, so here are honest answers.

This isn't a weekend project

I've been a professional software engineer for over ten years, and I'm now a Principal Engineer. That's the most senior hands-on engineering title most companies have: one level below management, where you're trusted to make the calls that decide whether a system holds up under real pressure. Along the way I've built and run other products used by millions of people. I've already been through what happens when a system gets popular fast, what breaks under real-world load, and what it takes to keep something reliable once people depend on it every day.

Elite Ice isn't something I threw together and hoped for the best with. I build it the same way I'd build anything for an employer with a reputation on the line, because once a fan opens this app expecting a live score, that trust is just as real to me as any paying customer's.

None of it happens during office hours, either. My wife and I have three kids, three cats and a dog, and they all come first. Elite Ice gets built in whatever's left over: an hour after bedtime, a Saturday morning before the house wakes up, a stray half hour between one thing and the next. It's slower going than a full-time job would be, but the standard doesn't drop just because the time is scarcer.

Where it runs

Elite Ice's backend runs entirely on Cloudflare, one of the largest infrastructure companies in the world. It's the same network that sits in front of a huge share of the internet, including banks, government services and household-name apps, and that's a deliberate choice:

None of this is exotic. It's the same infrastructure a bank, an airline or a large retailer would choose, and Elite Ice is held to that same standard rather than cutting corners because it's free.

What Elite Ice knows about you

There's no sign-up screen, no login, no email address, no password. You download the app and it works. That's the design, not a missing feature.

A handful of optional features (voting on a feature idea, marking a game you attended, picking a winner before a face-off) need something to tell one phone apart from another, or everyone's votes would blend into one. For that, the app generates a random, meaningless ID on your device, sends it over an encrypted connection, and the server one-way hashes it before it's ever written to a database. There's no name, no email, no account, and no way to trace that ID back to a real person. Delete and reinstall the app and it starts fresh, because there was never a "you" stored to begin with, only an anonymous device marker.

• No ads. Nothing sold, and nothing tracking you across other apps or websites for advertising.
• No accounts. No password database sitting there waiting to be breached.
• No selling data. There's no business built on your information; there's simply nothing to sell.
• Analytics tied to a device, not a person. The app does build a picture of how one install uses it, but that picture sits behind a random ID with no name, email or account ever attached to it.
• Crash reports when something breaks. Like almost every app, a crash sends standard technical details (device type, OS version, an IP address) to a bug-tracking tool so it can be fixed, not to build a profile of you.

That last one is worth being precise about, because "anonymous" oversells it if I'm not careful. The analytics tool the app uses does keep a profile against a randomly generated per-install ID: things like your favourite team, your alert settings, and roughly how a feature gets used. That's the difference between knowing a new feature is genuinely going unused and just guessing, or only hearing from the handful of people who happen to email in. What that profile never has is anything that identifies you: no name, no email, no account, and nothing that connects it back to a real person. It's a profile of a device's settings and habits, not a profile of you.

The safest data is the data that was never collected in the first place, and that's the approach here.

Tested like it has to work

Elite Ice is built the way software gets built at companies that can't afford to get it wrong: unglamorous practices that never show up on screen, but are the reason something stays reliable for years instead of weeks.

None of that is visible when you open the app to check tonight's score, and that's the point. Good engineering is invisible. You mostly notice it by what doesn't go wrong: the app that doesn't lose your favourite team, doesn't leak your data, doesn't fall over on the busiest night of the season.

Why this matters for a "free fan app"

People are right to be more cautious about a small, independent app than a giant corporation's. But size isn't really what determines whether something is trustworthy; the standards behind it are. A huge company can still cut corners under pressure to ship fast, and a one-person project can still hold itself to a higher bar, if that's what its builder chooses to do.

I built Elite Ice because I'm a hockey fan who wanted a better app than what existed, not to build a business on your data. If anything, being independent is what let me hold it to that bar: no investors to please, no growth targets to hit, nothing to compromise on to get there.

Questions, always welcome

If you ever have a question about how something works, or a concern about your privacy, I'm happy to answer it. You can find this project on Instagram, or connect with me directly on LinkedIn. Trust is something you earn by staying reachable, not by writing one blog post and moving on.