So for my first Sinatra project I decided to build out the first part of an application that has been in the back of my mind since the beginning of my coding adventure. This was something that I knew I wanted to do from the time I enrolled at the Flatiron school and its amazing to see it actually start to come to life.
A few years ago myself and several other co-workers had gotten significantly out of shape. The company sponsored fitness challenges every year, but they didn’t seem to really have any impact, so we came up with one of our own. We called it the Humiliation Challenge (I know not great from a marketing standpoint). The idea was accountability.
To participate you had to have a fitness tracker (apple watch, fitbit, garmin, etc.), you had to have a fitness scale (withings, nokia, garmin, fitbit, etc.) and you had to use MyFitness Pal to track your food. Every day what you ate, your weight, your bodyfat, whether you worked out, your active calories and what you ate were compiled from MyFitness pall and published to everyone else who was in the contest (thats where the humiliation thing came in). These things were translated into points to see who the winners were.
This was a hugely successful contest for the people brave enough to compete. In the first round we started with almost 40 people and finished with around 25 with an average weight loss of almost 30 lb’s and 4% bodyfat. The problem was that after running the contest multiple times a year for a few years it became very cumbersome for everyone to compile and submit their data and then for that to be published out everyday. Being a software development company we always talked about someone building an app, but no one did.
This is where my Sinatra project started. I wanted to build out the skeleton of this app based on the requirements for the project and then potentially continue to build it out in future projects. Even the basic version that I landed on ended up going quite a bit beyond the requirements, but it was good because it helped me get up to speed and understand allot of things that I wasn’t 100% clear on in the previous learning labs.
This has been a great experience and I hope to go on to eventually build out the full application and get it tied up to the MyFitnessPal API and start the Humiliation Challenge up again.
