About
It started as
one page.
For years the races I ran went onto a page on my personal site. Name, date, distance, finish time, a bib number, a link to the timing certificate, and whatever photographs I had. It was a table, and it did the job, and every time I finished a race I found myself editing a data file by hand to add a row to it.
Two things were wrong with it. The photographs — the part I actually cared about, the part anyone else actually looked at — were the smallest thing on the page. And it was mine alone: every runner I knew had the same folder of race photographs and the same nowhere to put them.
So the table became a product. The races from that original page were the first data ever imported into RunFolio, which is a slightly absurd origin story for a piece of software and also the honest one.
It is free, it has no advertising, and it is not trying to become a social network. Strava already does the hard, useful work of tracking every run you do. This is for the twenty or thirty of them that had a start line.
What it is trying to be.
The photographs are the point
A race is not a row of numbers. Somebody took a picture of you at kilometre 40 and it is sitting in a folder nobody opens. Everything here is arranged around showing it.
A record you own and can hand over
One address, yours, that works whether or not the person opening it has an account. No app to install, no login wall, nothing that expires off the bottom of a feed.
It should not nag anyone
Most people who open a profile are there for twenty seconds to look at a friend's marathon. They are not a conversion opportunity. There is no sign-up banner on a public page and there is not going to be one.
Fast on a bad connection
Pages are rendered on the server and ship almost no JavaScript. Photographs are compressed before they are ever uploaded. Most of the people opening these links are on a phone, on mobile data, in a messaging app.
Who built it
Sanket Tambare
Full-stack software developer, currently at Emtec Inc., working across web development, data engineering and the plumbing that holds both up. Also a research fellow with the Network for Advanced Study of Technology Geopolitics at the Takshashila Institution, which is a longer way of saying I read a great deal about technology and the societies it lands in.
I run five days a week and have done for years — road mostly, with a standing habit of trekking the Sahyadri forts when a weekend allows it. Away from a screen I read, write, and take design and video editing more seriously than a hobby strictly requires. Most of what I am interested in sits at the seam between technology, society and psychology, which is a roundabout way of admitting I am curious about almost everything.
RunFolio is the intersection of two of those: the running, and the urge to build the thing rather than complain that it does not exist.
You can also just look at my own profile — it is the same page every other runner here gets, and it is the most honest thing I can show you about whether this is any good.
Got races sitting in a folder somewhere?
Claim your profile →