Here’s an update for those of you awaiting a formal release of the post-Strava version of Crickles.
The beta version described in the previous post is proving stable and the package of functionality that is there now will not change substantially this month.
The main remaining “to do” concerns the initial data load on the first visit. Anyone who has tried the beta will have seen that this currently takes a few minutes, which is not ideal. In Crickles Classic this was not an issue as the Navigator was not immediately available on sign-up and the delay between signing up and being able to access the Navigator enabled Crickles to backload and process a meaningful chunk of data. If anyone is especially interested in the thinking about how to process the initial load more quickly while not incurring further costs in an app that I don’t want to charge for please get in touch; if you’re familiar with docker and AWS lambdas you’ll understand the options under consideration. Similar considerations apply to preparing for a potentially significant uptick in user volumes.
The other topic that I’ve been giving thought to is how best to make Crickles “open”. Here, the issue is primarily a “what to” rather than a “how to” question. Making the GitHub repo containing the Navigator code publicly available, for example, wouldn’t be a very effective way of opening up Crickles methodologies to non-programmers. On the other hand, not showing any code at all is probably not open enough as code is ultimately the best language to describe how things truly work. As an experiment in finding a good balance, I’ve put together this description of exactly how Crickles calculates your sustainable heart rate on the Sustainable Levels page. This is substantially less meaty than topics such as the calculation of cardiac stress and feels like a good place to start. Please let me know whether you’d like to see more like this or whether a simpler kind of description would be more useful.
I’m still hoping to get a release out this month. Follow this site for news.
Ian