Monthly Archives: March 2020

New version fixing old legacy code

Posted on by
11

ConnectStats has been around for a while now. It started in 2011, while the Garmin API was in a very different place as today. I have maintained it over the years, but there is still quite a bit of complexity in the code due to the history of the API evolution.

I am pushing a new version that simplifies some of the legacy internals of the code.

As any internal upgrade, it will help in the future and fixes some side effect or bugs coming from the legacy complexity. But it also comes with high risk as it is hard to test all the side effect. I’ll try to fix what comes out.

Continue reading →

Quick review of COVID-19 data

Posted on by
1

While I am still preparing a new release of ConnectStats fixing a few issues, right now, the corona virus is a major distraction for most of us. While the virus spreads there is a lot of information floating around and it can be sometimes be a bit confusing. So I decided to see what could I verify on my own at home with basics analysis and tools. I’ll be using python/jupyter/pandas, which is very standard and easy to install or can be run directly on google collab

This may become a bit technical for some, but hopefully will be interesting and may help some people learn more about python and pandas as more of us have to stay home…

Continue reading →

Never ending service and server saga

Posted on by
4

Time flies. It has been close to one year since Garmin opened its new API to third party developers and that I embarked on migrating ConnectStats to using it. I had anticipated it would be fairly straight forward, but, boy, it has been quite a ride, and the last few weeks continued to provide a lot of “excitement”. Let me share some of that story…

Quick recap of the service

In the past ConnectStats was connecting to the Garmin Connect website to extract the data for the user activities. While this was the way ConnectStats worked from the beginning (2011!!!), it was simple as I didn’t have to maintain any online servers, but it was not very robust and repeatedly created serious outage as the Garmin Connect website would change its way of getting data without any type of support or documentation. I would typically have to find out via a multitude of bug report and try to reverse engineer what had changed on the web site.

The new service is fully documented and supported, but the flip side is that it works by pushing the fit files of a user to the application web server in the cloud. Which means you need to have a web server in the cloud, which I didn’t…

Continue reading →