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2023-02-12
The Crankbank is the name I've given to a database of my bike rides, and the tools that surround it. It's a project that I've started a few times and never quite stayed in the habit of using. Mostly I'm building the Crankbank for fun, but also to address some qualms that I have with existing activity tracking services like Strava. For one, they put some roadblocks between me and my ride data. Secondly I can's help but feel some distrust of commercial web services.
I enjoy programming. Writing "Hello world" is no fun at all, but man, writing code that spits out graphs, I think that is pretty damn fun! A good graph needs data, and data about how much I've been riding my bike is fun data in my eyes.
Whenever I look at my year-end Strava data I find myself wondering about things that it doesn't report. One classic example is how much time I spent not moving, but with my GPS recording a track. I think of this as my chilling time. I get it; Strava's core audience of serious athletes probably doesn't care about this metric. It wouldn't make sense for them to report it, but I think it would be fun to know. I could use the Strava API and make an app that calculates this for me, but by the time I've requested API credentials, agreed to their terms of service and read some API documentation there's a good chance I will have lost interest. This sort of thing makes me want my ride data to live in a database that I have easy access to.
Strava tries to market themselves as a somewhat privacy conscious company. They claim they do not sell personal data. When I load the Strava web page, though, the Privacy Badger browser extension blocks two connections to Facebook servers. That's enough to make me question their sincerity. They do sell aggregated data. When their UI encourages you to track which bike you rode on a particular ride, or to tag a ride as a commute or race, it feels more like that's in service of the people buying the data than in service of the people submitting the data.
Ultimately, it's about building the tool that I want rather than settling for the tools that already exist. Something a little less commercial, a little more flexible, and a lot more personal.