The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have seeped into so many of our lives, touching areas that aren't immediately evident. For me, aside from working from home, the other big daily habit change was no longer going to the gym in the morning. I have been on the CrossFit train for a while and was doing the CrossFit.com workouts in my local gym until the shutdown the virus hit but the problem was I couldn't do the posted workouts at home without equipment. After a week or two of quarantine, I was eager to be active again and found CompTrain's Home Workouts, started for everyone stuck at home during the pandemic. Along with providing the workout, they created a space to post your results and comments on SugarWOD, which allowed for a dynamic community to form.
After gyms started reopening and they launched their new app, CompTrain announced they were no longer going to be providing access in SugarWOD, only posting the WOD on their website. I found out on a Wednesday morning that Sunday would be the last day the community would have the SugarWOD space we had all grown to know and love. I woke up early Thursday with my mind spinning and a plan forming.
I knew my timeline was incredibly short to launch something workable. I pared down the list of features to the bare minimum:
- Whiteboard: A place to show the WOD and discuss it
- Leaderboard: A sorted list of posted scores
- Log Workout: A way to save your score.
Along with trimming the features list to the bare minimum, I decided to use the tools I was most familiar with and leverage as many prebuilt options as possible:
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I used Create React App and Material-UI, since I have a lot of experience using them. I also didn't customize the default Material-UI theme at all except for changing the default primary color.
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I used Google Signin with the prebuilt FirebaseUI elements, so I didn't have to do any UI on the sign in page instead of building a custom signup and login flow.
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I communicated directly to the Firebase database from the frontend instead of building a full featured API.
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I would manually enter the workout instead of automatically retrieving it when it posted.
After making those decisions, on Thursday morning I started coding.
Thursday
I got started right before 5am and my first step was to generate a new project using Create React App. Next I created a firebase project and wired up the sign in page. After login was working, I got basic commenting working. By then it was time to head off to work and my coding time was up for the day.
Friday
I knew I wouldn't have much time on Friday due to work but I wanted to go ahead and start gathering potential users and gauge interest before I invested a lot more time in the app. I created a simple Google Form and posted the following message:
This community has been such a blessing to me in these strange days and I’m sad to see it go. I still plan to do the home gym track and I know many of you do too.
Since SugarWOD is going away next week, I’m working on a free replacement that should be ready in the next few days. If you’re interested, request an invite here and I’ll let you know when it’s ready!
Fairly quickly I started getting signups and with every one that came in, I got more excited and motivated. Friday night my wonderful wife let me postpone our dinner plans and code instead. In that time, I added a sample WOD component and finished up the commenting.
Saturday
This was the day everything came together. I added routing to the app and leveraged that to create the log workout page. I also got the navigation unified around the selected date, and added the leaderboard page, which is a list of workouts logged on a particular day.
My wife has a great eye for design so together we designed a simple brand and bought the homeWODsquad domain name. Using the branding decisions we made, I updated the visuals and as a last step, connected the daily workouts component to the Firebase database.
Sunday
Launch day! I found a couple of small bugs and fixed them Sunday morning. I also added a simple contact form and some introductory text to the login page. After one last run through, I sent out this email to everyone who had signed up:
Hi squad!
This is your invitation to homeWODsquad - a replacement for our SugarWOD community since the CompTrain home gym will no longer be posted there. Hopefully this will help the community we've formed keep going strong! Check it out here:
I only realized the home gym track in SugarWOD was going away this Wednesday, so Thursday morning I got started building this. Since it's brand new, you'll probably see things you'd like me to add or may even run into a bug. If that happens, just reply to this email!
Cheers,
Andrew
The response was tremendous and way beyond what I had originally hoped. In the first few days, I had over 100 people sign into the app and lots of folks posting thank yous in the comments. If you're looking to workout at home and would like to join our community, come on over!
