TapDown is a results and schedule finder for the World and European Rowing Championships. It shows live race data and results across the senior, U23 and U19 championships, with filters for venue, country and event, so the question “how did the GB women’s pair go this morning?” takes one tap rather than a tour of a results site built for federations rather than fans.

Why it exists

I’ve never found it easy to get to what I want on the World Rowing site. As someone with a passion for rowing, data and technology that had been a minor frustration for years, and for Fantasy Rowing players it’s a daily one during a championships — the game scores from those results, and people want to check them.

So one evening in 2025, while experimenting with Claude Code, I built the search tool I wished existed. From idea to online took about 90 minutes. I wrote about the process in Building Tools That Matter.

How it works

Pick the regatta. World Championships, European Championships, and the age-group versions of each.
Filter. By country to follow your team, by event to follow a boat class, or leave everything open to see the whole day.
Expand a race for the full result, or refresh during a session to pull in the latest.

It’s a web app, so there’s nothing to install: it works on a phone on the bank as well as in a browser at a desk.

What it taught me

It’s a small tool, but it’s a good example of how much the cost of experimenting has dropped. A results finder that would have been a weekend’s work a few years ago is now an evening’s, which changes which ideas are worth trying at all. The judgement — what to build, what the fan actually needs, when the first version is good enough to ship — is still the part that takes experience. The typing is no longer the bottleneck.

Elsewhere

TapDown
Building Tools That Matter, the write-up of how it was built
Related: Fantasy Rowing, the prediction game these results feed.

← All projects