What a programming-vibe marathon that was! I didn’t even have time to describe the two days I spent riding as a courier.
The script for daily reporting of the game called POPRZECZKA stopped working. There were attempts to revive it. Then hours of tinkering, planning, searching for alternatives. I really didn’t want to go back to checking every single participant’s entry and then manually typing everything into that complicated spreadsheet table.
It wasn’t until the evening that an idea finally came — like in “Pomysłowy Dobromir.” A few exchanges with Gemini (I’m using a one-month pro trial) and the concept was ready. An online form where anyone can enter data from our challenge. It will still be mostly me doing it, but maybe with a bit of gamification we can motivate others to help. Especially since it’ll now be easy to track who contributes the most to filling our database.
The foundation was a new module in the database (JSON) I built a few months ago. Thanks to transferring data from the spreadsheet, I can now generate colorful visualizations of historical data.
The new module is a simple form where results can be added easily. No typing commands, no long participant names — just a dropdown list and a simple choice: completed, not completed, or no data (which also counts as not completed). This handful of inputs creates a colorful online database. And now it’s not only me who can view it — anyone visiting the site can: https://poprzeczka.streamlit.app/ .
This change brings a few consequences. I wrote about it on the @poprzeczka account. I’ll repeat them here in more detail:
Access to current results and the full history of the challenge is now online. You no longer have to wait for reports delayed by several days on hive.blog.
The data is also accessible on phones. No more issues with different versions showing different amounts of information.
Anyone can enter data, anytime, from anywhere. Choose a participant, a stage, whether the stage was completed or not, add a signature, and submit. That’s it.
Results update instantly and are immediately available for analysis. No need to wait for reports from around the world. You can view partial rankings as well as the official standings with complete data.
No more collecting detailed step/activity counts. Those numbers were interesting for stats, but for the competition only one thing matters: whether a stage is completed or not.
Easy translation into English (I can add more languages too).
In a way, we’re going back to the roots. Data must be entered manually, but anyone can do it. I’ll try to reward the most helpful contributors. Now my task is to come up with a good system using the form data.
Garmin and Strava data are allowed, but you need to send a screenshot (from time to time in a hive.blog report or in the form). In other words, you need to show proof of your steps. For Strava, we currently use a km-to-steps conversion.
You can enter your own results — and I encourage you to try it. It’s super simple. Just go to the form (data entry form): https://poprzeczka.streamlit.app/ , select your name, stage number, completed/not completed, and confirm.
This revolution makes us a bit more independent from Actifit. A screenshot and honesty are enough.
And it also makes us less dependent on hive.blog. Posts no longer need to be published regularly. No need to wait for results — everyone can see them whenever they want.
