Fietskalle

Drafting a poor man’s strava substitute for selfhosting freaks

Fietskalle has not a single line of code yet. But here’s some plans on how it could work

Why?

I don’t like Strava any more. I’ve join in what, like 2012? and paid for it as soon as it was possible. Because why not? I use it every day, I like it very much, I get a lot of use out of it. My motivation became a sustained all year thing, while before I had a lot of up, downs, you know it. Going the same base training route for the what feels like 1000 times? When the weather is not so brilliant? Tracking progress with notes? Loading tracks into that horrible Garmin Windows thingy?

Well, a long time ago, when I started using GPS (good old eTrex brick with 4 AAA batteries?) I thought it would be nice to

• automatically identify trails/roads I’m doing quite often
• tabularizing speed/times etc.
• plot progress/regress for those. Never got anywhere. Decided overlaying everything with everything and detecting common parts was too complicated for my little brain, and besides, who cares

And a few years later, Tada!!! Strava (with the genius idea of just letting people do the hard part). (I’m not a social person, never thought of the social network part)

Anyways

I liked it: Simple UI. Can do what I need. Some things would be nice, though, mostly they came around, mostly route planning, quite good, later on even Gravel Mode. Sometimes it would’ve been nice to DM people, but whatever. Route organization? Rudimentary, but works.

The downfall of Strava

The Membership levels: Come on. I mean, cutting down free tier features, no prob, go. The way it was done? Confusing at best.

But then the features started coming:

• Athlete Intelligence: yes, please, read a histogram to me:

  here would have been a recent example, but it’s a premium feature and gone

  Not sure, but I think most Athletes would be able to make much more sense of that than the Intelligence. Felt a little bit offended. new features that don’t do much for me. Still looking hard for that route I planned last time I was in Sweden

• UI improvements one after the other. I’m old, and for $reasons get easily confused by things moving around. Stop already! I guess your UX acceptance studies and A/B tests justified every one of them. To me it felt like trying to look busy (actually a lot easier now that I cancelled premium)

• Suing Garmin for not quite so brilliant features, ok, maybe only obvious once someone does them, but hm. looks like trying for a nice settlement for shareholder satisfaction.

• Isn’t the whole point of competition to try to be better and if the come up with the same thing, come up with something even better?

So

Fietskalle

(Preliminary name): My first big project at $ork_{n-1}$ was called Forskalle, from swedish: Fårkskalle = Sheep skull, slightly stupid person. Ever since then almost all my software projects are called stg-skalle. (Pronounced /ˈskalːɛ/, danger tiktok link Ska-leh). Fiets is dutch for bike. I always like that word.

Rough Draft:

Open Source, AGPL. Ready for self-hosting

• User registration, maybe rudimentary self, offload to Skara
• Upload .fit
• store in db
• plot on OSM
• calculate+show basic stats (dist, elevation, mean HR, speed, normalized power, …)
• some obvious plots (line over time/dist, histograms, box/density plots, cumulative (think power curve))
• overlay plots?
• ride can have multiple categories (=^tags?)
• upload, categorize/tag routes (default private)
• annotate routes
• geo search for own routes
• match rides to routes (perhaps manually)
• Segments? FGS, don’t call it that
• Heatmaps? Ditto, too risky

no more. Unless I forgot something I want? Don’t do too much cycling anymore. Ah, oh yeah, speaking of that

• Comeback mode: Temporarily reset best efforts etc, because seeing how good you once where vs how bad you now are is not good for the soul

Technial Details

… are thin on the ground, ideas welcome

• store in Postgres DB, PostGIS seems awesome
• .fit parsers are available!
• Precalculate plots etc, I know R, so that it’s gonna be?
• precalc: upload upload -> offload to job queue, generate, store status + links in DB
• there are some libs in R that do interactive plots, never had much reason to play around with that, looks fun
• FastAPI backend, know it by now, is fun
• I like Vue for frontend, maybe don’t need a SPA? Render Templates?
• API if someone doesn’t like the UI, OpenAPI spec almost for free with FastAPI + Pydantic

Hooray, when can I have it?

Probably never. So much to do, so little time. $$ork$, $$kids$, maybe some cycling one day again

Not so much cycling anymore also means there’s not so much dogfooding.

Onoz, can I help?

I guess. If you accept me as the supreme godlike leader of … joking. kind of. ok, let me do the fun parts, mostly graphing the way I would, even if you think R sucks.

Maybe I’ll semi-vibe code[*] a prototype?

[*] yes, I think it has its uses.