NateIsTraining.com
This weekend I finally released stable v0 of my website, NateIsTraining.com.
I get to spend a lot of time thinking during my long workouts as I train for my upcoming Ironman in September. During one of these long workouts a thought occured to me: it would be cool to create a blog style website of my own for my friends and family to follow along with my training progress. Strava already does a great job of this through its website and app, however I have many family members who don't already have an account to log in and follow along. Ideally, it would be best if they could just click a link and see what I am up to (hint: I'm training...) without having to go through a whole new service.
I had recently just set up this blog with GatsbyJS and Netlify, and had been dabbling with Google Cloud Functions. I checked out Strava's API, and boom, all the ingredients were there. Strava would send notifications to a Google Cloud Function, which would then in turn generate a markdown file, commit it to a GatsbyJS project on Github, and Netlify would take care of the rest...
I'll be spending some time detailing how this system is set up along with some of the things I learned along the way in some upcoming posts. From a high level, the system is facilitated by a single Google Cloud Function. It listens for a webhook from Strava that is sent whenever I finish a workout, makes some subsequent requests to get more details about the activity, generates a markdown blog post, and commits it to Github. From there, Netlify's awesome autodeploy function builds the website and pushes it live.
This project was mainly a good excuse to play with some different technologies in a unique way - I don't recommend the "markdown-as-a-database" approach for production applications! It is a super simplified view of each activity and was just plain fun to build.
The system is comprised of two repositories, hosted on Github for reference:
P.S. - You'll probably recognize the theme 😉 (thank you, LekoArts!)