After my son and I traveled to see all the NFL stadiums last year, we wanted to see if we could have a log of all the states we ran in. Of course, I could see on my Google History everywhere I had been, but I could get a clean list of conditions.
All of my runs exist on Strava. With their GPX files, we can determine the state(s) visited during a run. We had all the data we needed, but we wanted something prettier. Just a map of the United States with states we had visited colored in.
The Pitch
Create an app that tracks every state you have run in.
Inspiration
When we started our trip to visit all the NFL stadiums, I thought about getting a pinboard to mark the stadiums we had seen.
I realized that most people do this with a plan of spending years going to see every site. We would see all the stadiums in a few months. It would be like buying a puzzle that we had already put together.
I also didn’t want to spend $100 on a physical item. I wanted something digital that we had not already completed.
Working Together
As we made it back to our home base, I realized this was a perfect thing to help teach my son programming. I think learning by doing is a vital tool. When I spent my four years getting a degree in Computer Science, I barely ever worked on actual projects. It mainly was theoretical and uninteresting samples. So I decided I would help my son through all the steps of getting an application working: the good, the bad, and the weird.
I was able to teach him what I knew about Go and then watch a Youtube video together when I was trying to remember precisely why Go started using “context.” Then, we created an expo app, and he got to watch me struggle for 45 minutes to ultimately realize that I had typed “React-Native” instead of “react-native” in an import.
It has been great working through it, and I want to see what we can put together.
We hope to have a working version using my Strava runs this summer.