Trails in SA Project

Posted: February 20, 2022

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.