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Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

I finished up the first round of my side project: PeerGym http://www.peergym.com let's you search for quality gyms in your area by membership price and amenities - the kinds of things services like Google Maps and Yelp don't do. Most people do a particular kind of workout (running, weights), and need special equipment (treadmill, barbells), and you can't always guarantee you'll know what you're getting just by the name and a few pictures.

It was mostly an excuse for me to learn Elixir and Phoenix. I've tackled auth, uploads, geolocation/geospatial DBs, SSL and more, so it's been a lot of fun and hopefully I can turn this into some sort of tutorial series on building out a real-world app.

For the future I want to add reviews, community edits, and advanced filters to make them easier to search and populate. And hopefully, accept payments if people want to buy passes to their gyms online (or automatically renew their memberships.

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My area only shows Crossfit gyms. Are there other gym types planned?

Also, although this appears more like a personal project and less like a startup, the ability to cancel a membership through this site would be great. Membership cancellation is one of the biggest pains with gyms today.

The original thought behind this experiment was to include quality gyms with a vast amount of equipment. Turns out that Crossfit gyms fit the bill there. I had a great data feed of them, so they represent about 90% of the gyms in the US on our list. The rest are smaller, mom-and-pop powerlifting and strongman gyms. If you sort by price you'll find many of those other gyms are listed on the site.

The next step is to offer passes online and allow you to cancel / augment your memberships. We just have to get the gyms on board :)

A lot of crossfit affiliates use the same software to do billing and manage membership logins. ZenPlanner and Mindbody are the most popular. You might have better luck going through them instead directly contacting the gym.

Also, how do you modify the data that is on there? There's incorrection information for my gym.

Nice, can you describe some of the interesting elements Elixir brought to development experience? How would you compare it to your previous tool of choice?

Great to see Elixir getting more use!

I'm a Rails developer so the transition was really smooth. I'm also very curious so I've tried a host of other languages in my time (Clojure, Haskell, Go, OcaML) so it wasn't too difficult to pick up. One thing I love is that if something isn't written in Elixir, you can just call the underlying Erlang library and have access to essentially two languages at once.

I also love how fast it is - things render extremely quickly even on a hobby dyno, which is impressive because that would never happen on a Rails side project. I also love the out-of-the-box ES6 support for JavaScript. Plus, I just really love writing in a functional programming style, so the language makes a lot of sense while retaining the ease of use when reading a language like Ruby or Python.

I think it's a nice project, well executed and sorta scratches an itch. I think if you actually want to try to get some usage, you're going to really have to put your business/growth hat on and really try and understand why people would use it, how they're going to find it, one or 2 key "wow" features, etc.

It seems like the focus is more to get one's feet wet with Phoenix/Elixir (especially as the OP refers to a tutorial series he wants to write) - not making this site into a wildly successful business

And that's totally fine (sort of). But sounded like author wanted to take it further.

It's both :)

Definitely working on that right now. People constantly move and travel, so they will be google searching for "gyms near X", so one strategy is SEO.

The wow features I feel like are going to be in being able to buy gym passes online (and cancel them). Basically try and circumvent the terribly oppressive process of not being able to cancel your membership.

Will you open source it? I wanna make something like this for yoga studios. How long did it take?

I'm not - I plan on turning this into a business, and will be including yoga studios as my next iteration.

What did you use for auth, uploads, ssl? Are there good libraries out there?

For auth I forked my own build of the Passport hex. For uploads I used the Arc hex, and for SSL I used Letsencrypt though I eventually realized that Heroku charges $20/mo for SSL and I'm not accepting anything like credit cards yet so it hasn't warranted the expense. Awesome-elixir is a great source for libraries, and it's had everything I needed so far:

https://github.com/h4cc/awesome-elixir

What did you do on the deployment/hosting side?

I used Heroku, as there are buildpacks for Elixir and Phoenix for Heroku on github: http://www.phoenixframework.org/docs/heroku

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