Our Start
Brief history of HotLaps...
Jane Fossett invented Hotlaps, she used timed laps to calculate handicaps since years ago ( I remember doing them in 2007 or 08 already! )
She started out doing everything manually and later had a spreadsheet where people could manually enter their times and boat times for Hotlaps courses at a few race lines in SL.
The project went to sleep for a couple of years which was a shame cause it was fun!
Jane likes what we are doing a lot but is not really involved!
Burt set his mind to making a line that could log times and boat types automatically to Google sheets.
Not for getting data but for a 24/7 race that people can enter at a time it suits them.
After finishing the line and testing it for a week the challenge was basically over because he only wanted proof of concept.
At that time Christine felt we should go on and suggested she would do the organizing part of it. Awesome!
After a few weeks it became clear to her too that although a nice idea the Hotlaps on tour and moving the line to a new location every week was a little much.
We needed more help if we would like to keep this up.
Meanwhile it seemed Hotlaps was catching on and it was ever so much fun "working" on it, finding new places, meeting new people.
At some point we logged over 600 laps a week... BIG DATA... Lucy put a lot of work into calculating handicaps. ( nice touch that Jane's work was continued )
And a lot of happy Hotlappers!
More crew was added slowly over time, we now have 11 members.
Became clear is is not easy to work together with 11 people around the globe without some form of organizing.
It should be fun to do this "work" and not too demanding on our SL.
Good fun about running any project is we encounter issues and then we may start puzzling on trying to make it better!
Right now we (Fanny is doing most of the heavy lifting!) are working on a management system that should make working together as a crew much easier.
And Fanny is in the process of setting up a fully automated system for calculating handicaps processing the many thousands of laps we logged over the time Hotlaps on tour is active and the laps we log in the future.
It is nice to see how good things seem to last.
We found a lot of new friends.
Hotlappers are playfully becoming faster sailors.
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Where will this evolve to? Who will know!
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by Burt