Cards of Death

Family Problems

My wife and I love working out, but she hates working out at home. Until we had our son a couple of years ago we were both regulars at Crossfit but the little guy has made it tough to fit in for both of us.

I wanted to learn JavaScript programming for a while, so I took the chance to build a personal fitness app to flex my coding skills.

Although there are a number of online versions like this already, I wanted to tailor this for our home kit and space.

The Workout

Cards of Death is a simple Crossfit workout and my wife’s favourite.

The idea behind this is for you to pick a card from a deck and do the exercises and pick another. When you pick a joker, you either double or half your next card. A lot of fun if you are a sadist.

The Prototype

Firing up Codepen I was able to knock out the first version ready for our Sunday morning workout in about an hour.

The idea was simple, load a JSON file of objects and randomise the output. This worked, and we blasted through a tough HIIT workout the next morning. View Game on Codepen or the sample below.

The Backlog

What started as a solution to a couple problem turned into a fun project that could grow endlessly.

The UI needs some love and definitely a timer, currently we need to use a separate timer.

Overall I enjoyed the experience of building a tool quickly to satisfy a need I and it made a welcome change from creating standard websites.