Trails in SA Project
Thanks to the pandemic I started doing more hikes and local trails which was I suppose some kind of bright side to the whole thing. I wanted to share these with people (in hindsight probably should have put them on this website). I’ve also been taking part in the Hacktoberfest for a couple years which is challenge to make open source contributions. So I thought I could make a little crowd sourcing project to get trails and display then in a way I could send to family and friends easily.
I created this project called Trails Data where developers could do a simple contribution by adding a local trail to the project. For 2021 Hacktoberfest I did a whole lot of documentation to make contributing easier and made a number of issues with trails that needed to be added. I even made a quick Gatsby site to have the data displayed nicely. Here is the site https://runningdeveloper.github.io/trails-data/. I added more trails and sent it out to a few people and tagged the issues with hacktoberfest. But unfortunately I only have some contributions from my good friend Lebogang (Thank you if you read this).
What have I learnt?
- I don’t think developers like to add content and prefer to do code (this is obvious now 🤣). I think I will try to make some more interesting code contribution options available.
- I am absolutely rubbish at marketing (I mean I don’t even think I made a tweet about this, most likely too scared). Need to work on this.
- My hiking and running friends don’t really code or are interested in Github.
- Probably should have made it more general it’s too specific to South Africa and being fit and active outdoors.
- It was cool to figure out how the whole maintainer aspect of open source works, even if I didn’t really get much interaction with contributors.
Anyway I’m still going to keep adding to it. It’s kind of a nice to have a list of trails I can send people that has a rough description of what the trail is like.
Please add a trail if you can. Here is a picture from the latest one I did.
