The Tool Belt #3: When A Script Isn't Enough

This is the Tool Belt, the newsletter that helps camp directors work smarter, not harder.

We help you level up your camp game - like a real-life version of the Mario mushrooms.

It took me 1 minute, 3 seconds to read this post.

👨🏻‍💻 When A Script Isn’t Enough

Last week, we talked about scripting. For the new folks, that’s a piece of code that solves a small problem.

(If you’re saying to yourself, I’m a camp director not a software engineer - I know. Hang on for a minute.)

Scripting is great, but sometimes you need less of an automation and more of a product.

Take my camp, for example.

In 2023 we wanted a way to learn the names of our summer staff. We have public staff profiles, but it would have been too much effort to manually input the information into a flashcard app.

Enter the custom tool. I decided to create our own flashcard app, using the data we already had.

Here were the steps:

1. Scrape the data from our public staff profiles.

2. Transform the data into a better format for code.

3. Build a very basic flashcard app with the data that allows users to flip cards and build a streak.

4. Get a domain and deploy the site.

This way of doing it works well for us and we use it every year. It takes me 10 minutes to set up every season.

I’m convinced there are tons of opportunities to build useful internal tools at camp.

That said, let’s go back to the objection from the beginning: you’re a camp director, not a developer.

Heard, chef. That’s why I want to introduce a new tool this week: Replit. Replit lets you build your own apps through AI with just a prompt.

It’s not perfect (yet), but it’s pretty dang good. If you have an idea for an internal app at camp, fire up Replit and give it a shot.

As always, let me know if I can be helpful.

🔦 Tool Spotlight: Camptivities

Scheduling can be a huge time suck for directors. Since we’re talking about software that helps you save time, we wanted to introduce Camptivities. Camptivities was designed so that anyone at your camp can do the scheduling for your program. If your scheduling is a nightmare, check it out!

⛺️ Around the Campfire

An interesting discussion on the ACA forum about moving from paper to digital forms:

🤣 The LOL Lodge

Until next time,

Peter “Ropes Course Rebel” Elbaum