My other hobby

Something I haven’t spoken about before on this blog is my love for sim racing. It’s the single biggest hobby I have when I'm not creating. It's my "consume" hobby. My "seat rot" hobby. A hobby where I've built a sanctuary of-sorts out of extruded aluminum, and high tech electronics. It's such a big part of my life that I regularly geek-out sometimes to IRL friends or coworkers to looks of confusion. To say that sim racing makes up a substantial part of my life would be completely fair. 

So why am I bringing this up?

Because over the past 4 days, I’ve been working on some projects for our sim racing group, Ten10 Motorsports. The first big reveal is a brand-new website, www.ten10motorsports.com! Using Blogger (the same web program I use for this website,) I developed a “front page” for our sim racing group. Up until now, we’ve used Discord to communicate race results. While that has served us over the years, race results tended to get buried and we never had a web presence beyond a link to our Discord.

The visitor is greeted by a clean, race-inspired front page, an archive of our digital sim racing magazine Ten10 Auto, and page links to the results from various events we host. The real magic of our leaderboards and results pages stems from scripts that pull data in real-time to display the most current, updated numbers and ranks. Everyone who is participating in a Ten10 event will get to see the results much sooner, and the most current results, whenever they visit the website. Pretty snazzy if you ask me!

The second thing I've been working on were trophies for our league winners. We've always discussed doing this to add just a little bit of legitimacy to our leagues and to promote consistency in drivers showing up. So, naturally, I took on the task of figuring out what that award might be. At first I wanted to do something simple, like a keychain with our logo on it. After going back-and-forth with designs, I decided to scrap that idea.  It just wasn't "grand" enough.  Then I moved to the idea of a plaque that could be displayed on a desk or mounted to a rig. The more I looked into it, the more I felt like a plaque would be too old-timey for us. We ain't that kind of group. So I ended up searching Maker World within Bambu Studio to browse printable awards. 

And there it was... what I've been searching for all this time: A customizable trophy with base and nameplate.  A beautiful trophy that can be printed at scale, without supports, and a plaque that can be changed to make it "ours." So that's what I did.

So there it is! What I've been doing for the past week on my down time.  A new website for our sim racing group and some neat trophies to ship out to the winners after each season concludes.