I’ve been a bit slow to update my blog series about trying to make a clone of
Zwift, but not because I’ve stopped working on it. Rather, I’ve been able to use
the “MVP” of what I’ve built so far in parts
1
and
2,
and I was finding that the time I spent working on my app could be used actually
working out. Like, I literally would write an implementation of something, but
it would take so much of my time that I couldn’t test it out and I’d have to go
to bed… Still, I was missing a few important features in my app, so I’ve been
slowly working on them in between working on my fitness.
Since writing that article, I cleaned up the implementation of the Core
Bluetooth service a bit and started supporting some additional data like
distance, calories burned and cycling cadence.
While cycling on my exercise bike and staring at these numbers is fun, the
built-in screen on my bike already shows these numbers, so I essentially
recreated a subset of the official
ergData app so far.
The ergData app is functional but ugly af
I realized the next challenge would be to start a guided workout in my app and
show the target wattage alongside my actual wattage on the bike.
It’s been a while since I’ve worked on a personal project, but I’ve been having an itch to make some new iOS apps and yesterday morning I decided to go ahead and hack something together.
I recently purchased an exercise bike called the BikeErg (I think the name has something to do with the rowing machines that the manufacturer also makes). The bike has a built-in computer that keeps track of things like watts (apparently cycling is a sport that has really good analytics since it’s easy to track raw power), calories burned, cadence and other stuff. You can view the data on the monitor or use an app like Zwift to do workouts.
The BikeErg comes with the PM5: the most advanced PM thing ever.More …
Me speaking at iOSCon London 2018. Image copyright Ed
Telling
A few years ago, I made a goal for myself that I would start speaking at
conferences. In the past I had gone to quite a few awesome conferences and I
really admired the folks who could get on a stage, share a bunch of knowledge
and inspire an audience to do cool stuff. While I had a bit of experience with
public speaking (I spoke at some local iOS/Android meetups and moderated two
panels at SXSW back in ’11 and ’13), I wanted to try for a “real” conference
spot.
I think the conference that convinced me to start applying was Swift Summit,
which I attended in 2015. There were a number of really inspiring talks, and the
community felt really fresh and welcoming. One interesting aside: I learned
after joining Lyft that no fewer than three of my current coworkers on iOS spoke
at that conference (Keith,
Sam and
JP, though only Keith was working
at Lyft at the time) and a few others attended that year. I’m not sure if that’s
correlation or causation at work.
A week or two ago I got an email from Google telling me that my blog had once again been hacked. I’ve written before about getting hacked and I basically knew how to unhack myself, but I put it off for a bit until I checked my website again and noticed that Chrome was warning me to avoid it! This was pretty much the last straw. I decided to move off of self-hosted Wordpress and switch to something a bit more secure.
