Inspiration
I did daily exercise at the gym over Summer 2015, but felt that most of my progress was towards slowly building muscle. Despite the amount of cardio I did, I never felt like I burned enough calories to make a difference with my relatively unhealthy diet. For TerribleHack II, I decided to create a web app that really highlights the difference between what we think a calorie is and what it actually is.
What it does
WorkoutBuddy is a simple website that takes your weight in pounds, your exercise time, and duration of exercise, as inputs in order to calculate the number of calories burned during that exercise. The program then lists off various high-calorie food items and demonstrates that the workout only burned some small percentage of the calorie count of each of those foods.
How I built it
I decided not to use a framework, building the entire website in JavaScript, PHP, HTML, and CSS3. In true TerribleHack style, I also imported the jQuery library but did nothing with it. JavaScript sufficed since I didn't need much in the way of scripting.
Challenges I ran into
There weren't many challenges in this relatively simple web app. CSS can be finicky and tough to perfect so designing the web page wasn't ideal.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I was able to build the register and login pages for the site, including using the ripemd128 hashing algorithm, without much difficulty. The site is simple but does what it says on the tagline: "Deprecating exercise, one sad statistic at a time". I'm proud of the fact that I worked individually and still managed to have fun and complete a project for TerribleHack II.
What I learned
I learned that a lot of the time building even a simple web app is spent on routine and repetitive tasks, and using Laravel or another framework would simplify the nitty-gritty details and allow me to focus more on building features rather than core functionality.
What's next for WorkoutBuddy
To continue with the TerribleHack style, several features could be added, including demotivational phrases describing how much electricity was wasted if the exercise was performed using a machine...etc. The design of the site could also be improved, as well as the amount of features available to users once they log in.
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