Idea of the Week: Bruno Škvorc
Bruno Škvorc is a coder from Croatia, the editor of SitePoint’s PHP channel and a developer evangelist for Diffbot.com.
He also has a keen interest in developers’ health, including his own, and has set up an initiative for web professionals to pay a bit more attention to their physical well-being. The Walking Dev is the subject of Bruno’s article in our upcoming Scroll: Code magazine and is our Idea of the Week.
The Walking Dev
As a developer, how much attention do you pay to your health?
Do you spend your days fantasizing about taking up running “tomorrow”?
I did.
For the longest time. Until a few years back, I found myself looking like this.
I was a senior developer working a sedentary job at a local company. Long hair, Black Label Society shirt, and 100kg – the cliché. This was almost immediately before I decided to quit and go freelancing full time.
Concerned for my health, I set up a treadmill desk (just a plank over the handles, really), and started slow, gradually increasing the incline, speed, and distance. A few months later, the weight had melted away:
Now? Well, it’s been a while since that level of fitness. Due to a lot of moving (three cities in one year) and a lot of stress, I couldn’t keep up my treadmill routine – I’m now somewhere in between these two stages again, and growing concerned. Here’s a recent photo from OSCAL.
You might be wondering why I don’t just work standing up, or eat less – and those are valid and interesting discussions for another time (the answers, however, being “standing desks are far unhealthier for your back than sitting, and I’ll be out with proof soon” and “it’s not just about the calories”, respectively).
But at this point, I’m just focused on getting healthy again – and I’d like your help, while helping you do the same.
To get there, I’ve launched “The Walking Dev“.
The Walking Dev is an online hub of resources, articles and testimonials aimed at improving the health levels of developers’ lifestyles. The name comes from my own approach of (originally) using nothing but walking to shed the excess weight, but it’s by no means exclusive to treadmill desk enthusiasts.
The site’s forum is where all the discussion around fitness happens: meet your fellow devs, brag with before / after photos, ask for advice, find inspiration, compete with others in tracked miles or minutes of activity – anything goes, within reason.
The most popular posts from the forum will appear in The Magazine area – alongside other more formal articles from influentials, in depth guides, studies, news, and more. Think of the magazine area as something like SitePoint.com, but on a much smaller scale – many categories of many posts, specifically written for the purpose of exclusively appearing on The Walking Dev.
This area will also contain videos, screencasts, exercise guides, and more to help you get off that chair and into the squat rack or onto the treadmill.
Furthermore, inspired by the versatile Hero Panel, every user will have their own personal profile area with progress reports – from habit forming charts to Typify-inspired widgets, all customizable and embeddable in other locations.
The dashboard will also provide a subscription mechanism intended to notify you when you fall off the wagon, forget to track a habit, or anything else you’d like it to remind you of.
On the principle that a little competition is a healthy thing, we’re building in leaderboards, similar to the monthly challenges that fitness tracking apps like Strava or Endomondo have.
It’s important to note that the emphasis here will be on friendly competition and sharing of experiences rather than “being the best” – so while there will be prizes, the competitions themselves won’t be cut-throat.
Embedding leaderboard status in forum signatures, tweeting it, embedding it on personal blogs, chart views, comparisons … the point is we build these fantastic apps that can help people get and stay healthy while we let ourselves get unhealthy. Let’s use our skills to help ourselves.
Wherever you are, whatever your job title or description, come and join The Walking Dev.
Great reading, every weekend.
We round up the best writing about the web and send it your way each Friday.
