A platform like this didn’t exist’ – says creator of app for race events

SOME writers might argue, their best stories are based on real-life experiences. Similar can be said of a new website and app that’s popped up: Leggit.ie.

The man behind it is Kieron Keenan. He’s himself a passionate runner, has done marathons and all kinds of races across the country.

Kieron runs several times a week and all that he wants is to go to more local races: “But there’s all these local races that happen, even in Mayo alone, think there’s like maybe 20 or 30 races in the next next three months alone. And they are not all listed on one particular website,” complains Keenan, talking to The Mayo News about his new project.

Well, this will be a thing of the past as he has created leggit.ie. A website and app that helps finding races near you or somewhere in Ireland. All combined on one platform. Easy to use and search. Very consumer friendly.

But don’t be fooled, it wasn’t a straightforward process. The journey to how Keenan ended up here has almost been a marathon in itself. The basic idea has actually been on his mind for years and he just never got around it.

PICTURES: Were you spotted at this year’s first Ballinrobe Races meeting?

It all started with a good portion of disbelief: “I was surprised a platform like this didn’t exist. Surely this is out there somewhere. There’s these other sites and the chip timing companies that put on the races, the other race calendars that are out there, they’re great. But it’s just hard to bring it all to one place where you can literally just see everything. I couldn’t find it.”

So the task was clear. A platform was needed that collects all the information that’s scattered around the web and social media and funnels it into one place.

“It’s kind of like when you’re booking a flight, you can go to the individual airlines, like for example Aer Lingus or Ryanair or British Airways. But you can also go to Skyscanner and get a full picture of basically everything that’s happening.”

Experience
THIS is the moment where Kieron’s 18 years of experience designing and building software or other digital products for companies comes into play.

And besides that, he used an AI system called Claude. A big help that did much of the – pun intended – leg work for Keenan: “I got Claude to set up the staging and production environments. I got the system to get up the project folder. All the stuff that I could do myself but would just take me so long to do. Basically, with various prompts, just to get Claude to set all those things up.

It just takes all the heaviness of the project setup, all the heaviness of the bigger architecture things. It’s kind of like you’re nearly sitting in a managerial role where you’re reviewing someone do the basic work and just trying to guide them along the way.”

One of the biggest challenge along the way was building the automated process that verifies all the collected data from the web:

“It goes through a pipeline and every morning at 6am, it reviews all the sources, checks the information, stack ranks them to see what is very likely 100 percent accurate, what’s a little bit vague.

The automation checks the distances, checks the locations, checks whether it’s like if it’s sold out or there’s still tickets available.

And then if the system feels it’s accurate enough to show on the website, then it gets put onto the website essentially. It is an intricate process but the essential cornerstone of the platform.

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Fancy a run? Have a look yourself here.