Development
Development history
WatchMyUltra is built in the open, one swim at a time, by one person on the shore of Lake Ontario. Newest first.
| Date | Feature | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Two kinds of swim, named | The front door now separates swims whose crew set them up here from swims built around a tracker link that was already public, and says plainly, on every page, that nothing on the site is an official record. | |
| The whole swim, after the tracker forgets | SPOT only remembers two days of positions. The page now keeps every position it has seen, so a long crossing still starts at the start the morning after it finishes. | |
| The crew's times come first | When an observer records the start or finish, the page uses their time and says so, instead of our reading of the tracker. | |
| An honest finish window | The expected finish became a steady estimate with an honest window around it, tested position by position against every completed crossing, rather than a number that jumped with each new report. | |
| A phone page built for following | Phones got a scrolling page of their own: the headline numbers first, the map as a card, and a one-line explanation beside every measurement. A backgrounded tab now refreshes itself when it is reopened. | |
| Audience reports | Post-swim reports now show estimated viewers, repeat interest, peak concurrency, and fundraiser clicks, giving swimmers, charities, and sponsors a concrete picture of a crossing's reach. | |
| Resilient tracking and backups | Live checkpoints, explicit tracker-health states, safer start and finish judgements, one-command archiving, and offsite backups protect the record when a device, request, or server fails. | |
| Great Lakes depth | NOAA bathymetry became a map layer and a depth reading beneath the swimmer, adding geographic context to routes across the Great Lakes. | |
| Wind, waves, and water | ECCC wave and wind guidance joined water temperature and current overlays, helping spectators see the conditions shaping progress rather than watching an unexplained dot. | |
| Lev Goldberg · Lake Huron | Lev became the first swimmer whose crew set up watchmyultra as the tracking page for his crossing. More than a demo, it was the first test of the project as a service for someone else's swim, with a real audience, fundraiser, crew, and 30-hour crossing to support. | |
| Honest live status | Progress changed to distance covered, tracker silence stopped implying a finish, and early tracking gates made the public status match what could actually be supported by the data. | |
| Public project website | A dedicated landing page, local swimmer photography, and improved social previews gave each crossing a credible public home beyond the live map itself. | |
| Pre-start and finished states | Countdowns, planned-route layers, preserved real endpoints, and guarded result cards made the experience useful before a start and accurate after the landing. | |
| Map-first redesign | A full-bleed responsive map, glass information panels, replay playhead, track clusters, viewport-aware framing, and a mobile pass turned the tracker into a spectator experience across screen sizes. | |
| Replay and multi-tracker support | Headless MP4 exports made completed swims shareable, while dual SPOT-device merging and cadence-aware fixes improved continuity during real crossings. | |
| First working tracker | The initial live-swim page, configurable event details, and a fully populated demo established the small, independent foundation the rest of the project builds on. | |
| Attila Mányoki · Lake Ontario | This is where watchmyultra started. I wanted to follow my friend's Lake Ontario crossing and better understand what was actually happening during a 16-hour swim, not just watch a dot move across a map. I started building the tracker from that experience. |