Until recently, I had never really worked with an API. I knew what they were in theory. I understood they existed. But I had never had a real reason to touch one, let alone build something on top of one. My work historically leaned more toward design, product thinking, and systems, not directly pulling data from third party services and shaping it myself.

Lately my role has pulled me closer to the technical side of things. Not in a “I want to be a backend engineer” way, but in a “I want to understand how this actually works” way. And oddly enough, the trigger for that curiosity came from cycling.

I ride a lot. Outdoors and indoors. I track everything using Garmin and Strava. They are great products. But over time, I realized something small that kept bothering me.

Sometimes I just want to see my stats. In plain text. No feed. No kudos. No segments. No charts fighting for my attention. Just distance, time, elevation, averages. At the end of the day, that is honestly all I care about.

Strava, especially, is noisy. The social layer is strong and that is intentional, and for a lot of people it is the whole point. I ride with friends, but I appreciate the quiet.

Then one day I hit my Cursor usage limit for the month. Instead of paying more, I decided to try Claude Code.

My first interaction with a machine was DOS. No windows, no mouse, just text and commands. The terminal still feels natural to me. So opening Warp (my terminal of choice) and working entirely from the command line felt oddly familiar.

I went digging and found that Strava has an API. That was the moment.

Here is the data I want. Here is what I want to see. Here are my credentials. Build me an env file and keep it protected. Pull monthly stats and averages. Output it as text.

I sketched a quick idea of what the output might look like. Literally just text. No UI. No visuals. Then I let it run.

What came back was almost exactly what I wanted. A clean monthly breakdown. Simple averages. The numbers I actually look at. No extra framing. No social noise. Just my data, shaped the way I wanted it.

I know a Strava Pro account gives you more charts and deeper analytics. But more data was never the problem. The problem was signal.

Check it out here

I have no interest in turning this into a product, unless more feel the same..

This is software for one (SFO™). Which makes you understand what Wabi is doing and pushing for. And for the more technical, OpenClaw is starting to fill that gap.

This feels like the beginning of something important.

There will always be a need for SaaS built for the masses. Those tools are valuable because they are battle tested, optimized, and backed by teams who deeply understand infrastructure and scale. You pay for that expertise and it is worth it.

But software for one is different.

It is built purely around your needs. Your constraints. Your tolerance for noise. Your preferences. No compromises required.

APIs make that possible, and I want more.