My little dream project to improve endurance race management
Tags: startup, programming, discuss, react
Published: 2021-10-11 18:53:10

# The Dream

## TL;DR
Introduction here and seeing who else is a race director or in race management. Interested in building a system to help race directors. Oh, it's hard, I'm trying, have some bid ideas, and of course, I welcome your comments.

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Good morning from Sunny San Diego! I'm wondering if there are any other developers out there who are also race directors or involved in race management (Road or Trail Running)?

## Anyone else doing this?
I have been a race director (as a side hustle) since 2014 for a couple ultrarunning events and over the years been using a plethora of different systems to manage our workflows (information in different places and largely decoupled). I've learned what works and what doesn't for us over the years and have been thinking long and hard about ways to improve the workflow and integrate different processes and functionality into a system that improves and delights the race director and runner experience.

> Oh, how I dislike decoupled information! I want a single source of truth with information so it all can work together. Why does this have to be so hard?

## All the things

Just some of the things hosted in various places:
- runner registration
- website
- equipment inventory
- email lists
- newsletters
- wait lists
- timing
- email
- volunteers
- staff
- social media
- finances
- project management
- reporting
- the list goes on

## The goal
I'd like to optimize and connect the dots, make it so that I don't have to go to different places to fetch and use data. I want to create a solution that allows me to enter data once, which is then automated and re-used in all the various places needed with a click of a button or better yet, automated into practice. This could allow race directors scale their events, have more work-life balance, and the customer (the runners) could have a better experience with the race directors because they're dealing with an improved and more delightful process. 

## The struggle is real
This is a side hustle for me. Kind of a big dream to bring all this to realization! It would be fun and useful to develop, but aside from having a family, kids, a 9-5 job as a software engineer, it's hard to get moving at times because, well, life happens. I have started! That is key!

I have created a mind map of sorts with all my bright ideas and how those ideas flow together. I have many of the templates created from past experiences with respect to social, email, and project management. I need to start pulling these in and build the system out, piece by piece.

## I have started
I have started small with an important piece. Allowing core data to be merged into templates. This is nice start because these templates can be of any category (email templates, social post templates, website templates, etc). It's just data, so I'm working on this bit right now. Anyway, I started and that is what is important right now. I have the drive and the motivation to continue.

Here is a quick view of what I started. Pretty simple stuff...
- The content template (Emails templates, social post templates, etc)
- The content to merge (Merge tags can be categorized by event, social platform, etc)
- Add/Edit/Delete Merge tags
- Real-time previewer

Have not solidified on a tech stack yet, but this was built with React. Probably leaning towards MERN stack, but not tossing out the idea of going serverless in areas.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/1z6xc14jqgwbthuu0fws.png)

Happy Trails,
Brian