Biking has long been a hobby of mine, and as a result, it has worked its way into my professional life several times. After making an interactive bike racing game with Red Paper Heart in 2011, we kept getting requests for this style of head-to-head software to help with interactive Goldsprints-style races, often put on by messenger groups or other bike enthusiasts.

Our original project made use of a piece of open-source hardware called Opensprints, and I decided to write a new free front-end for the project in C++ using the Cinder framework. The result was Silversprints, an open-source graphical interface for bike racing, which has since been downloaded thousands of times around the world.

I’ve been maintaining the project since 2018, and still get the occasional support request. It’s been a joy to see it pop up in different places with different skins applied and to have it as the defacto free bike racing software.