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A. Koepcke
A. Koepcke

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Plate Calculator

What I built

A simple plate calculator for the gym.

Category Submission:

Program for the People

App Link

Plate Calculator

Screenshots

Alt Text

Description

Simple: Select your barbell. Add weights.
It then gives you the total in kilograms.

Link to Source Code

GitHub

Permissive License

MIT

Background

Lifting weights is, when done right, not only good for physical health, but also for mental health.
Wasting concentration and mental energy to calculate the total weight of barbell and plates, then checking and re-rechecking again, when I'm just glad I got to the gym and managed to grab a rack or bench, is, however, really annoying.

There used to be a simple, and pretty, website, that did just this, but apparently it is not online anymore.

There is also a bunch of other web apps and smartphone apps, though I have not yet found one that works with kilograms, uses the plate sizes I have available, and also looks good to my eyes.

How I built it

The app is a simple static HTML page.
Styling is done with TailwindCSS.

Functionality is implemented with Alpine.js.

I've been using Alpine when it was first released and still in Beta. It has grown and changed quite a bit since then, and I was looking for a simple app to try it out again. Functionally, the plate calculator is not quite as boring as the typical ToDo-List, but not so complicated that I would need days to understand and implement it.

The GitHub repo has a shiny "Deploy to DigitalOcean"-Button, that really made deployment way too easy.

Additional Resources/Info

TailwindCSS
Alpine.js

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