The need to support a new region came from one of our most active users. Her children used to swim with ROW (Region of Waterloo Swim Club), but the Hanover Swim Club is closer to where they live. As a frequent user, she couldn't find relevant information on GeekSwimmers relative to their new club. Still, before stopping using it, she asked if we could do something about it. We excitedly said: "Yes!"
Huronia is a historical region in the province of Ontario, Canada. It is located above the Southwestern Region and between lakes Huron and Simcoe. Swim Ontario defines it as an area that comprehends the following geographical regions: Bruce, Grey, Dufferin, Simcoe, Muskoka, Parry Sound, Kawartha Lakes, Peterborough, and Halliburton. You can find all affiliated clubs on Swim Ontario's website.
I genuinely thought it would be a matter of importing Huronia's time standards into the database, and voilà. But it was more than that. The database is actually mature enough to support the data, but the app was not ready to show it properly. The main issue was that we didn't want to show Huronia's standards to Western swimmers or Western's standards to Huronia's swimmers in the Time Benchmark. We had to add an extra filter in the benchmark form to prevent that.
The benchmark form is already significant, and adding an extra field would make it more time-consuming for everybody, but it had to be done. So, to make it less annoying, we are now saving all fields to the session cookie (the one you accept to use from time to time), which preserves the values of the fields even when you leave the page and come back later. Now, you don't always have to fill in the benchmark form. You just need to edit what has changed from last time.
Today, we have two regions in Ontario, Canada, but tomorrow, it can be a new province, a country, or even a continent. It just gets more complicated as the dataset grows. So, very soon, we will have to create a user account where many of these selections will be part of the user profile, preventing them from completing an even bigger benchmark form.
A user account brings more challenges, such as introducing terms of use, data protection rules, data accessibility, privacy, and many more, but that's unavoidable if we want to grow beyond our neighbourhood.
Thank you for supporting our initiative! We hope GeekSwimmers continues to be useful for you and your club.
