Where it all started.
The first real project I ever built, six months into learning to code. A Heath-Carter somatotype calculator. The vision behind Afitpilot was already there: take measurements about a person, compute something specific, give them back a meaningful output.
A 2019 artefact, preserved.
In the spring of 2019 I had been learning to code for about six months. I wanted to build something real, not another to-do list tutorial. So I picked the thing I knew best from my sports-science background: the Heath-Carter somatotype.
Somatotyping is a method that takes nine anthropometric measurements (height, weight, three skinfolds, two bone breadths, two limb girths) and turns them into a three-number profile of body composition (endomorphy, mesomorphy, ectomorphy). Carter and Heath published the modern formulation in 1990. It's still used in talent identification and sports research today.
I wrote the maths in vanilla JavaScript, hand-drew the somatograph in HTML canvas, found the academic references in my old university PDFs, and shipped it on GitHub Pages with a Bootstrap 4 wrapper. Looking at it now I can see every shortcut and every awkwardness of a first-time builder. I kept all of it.
Because the thing that matters isn't the code quality. It's the shape of the idea. Six years before Afitpilot existed as a company, I was already trying to do the same thing I'm doing now: take a set of variables about a person, run them through a system, generate a personalised output. My grandfather did it for heart disease in 1971. I did it for body composition in 2019. I'm doing it for athletic performance today. Same intellectual architecture, three generations apart.
Try it, exactly as it was in 2019.
This is the original code, hosted unchanged on Afitpilot. Bootstrap 4. jQuery. Vanilla JavaScript. A canvas element. The only thing removed is the Amazon affiliate panel for measurement equipment, because those tracking codes are stale and no longer relevant.
Open the standalone 2019 pageSource, demo, and the original Heath-Carter manual.
The same idea, six years later.
In 2019, the calculator took nine numbers about a person and returned three. Useful, but limited: a snapshot of a body, not a plan for it.
Afitpilot, today, takes a much richer set of inputs (training history, movement capacity, daily readiness, fatigue markers, sport demands, recovery state) and returns a programme that adapts as those inputs change. The somatotype tool was a static reading. Afitpilot is a feedback loop.
But the underlying belief is identical: a system built carefully, from real measurements about a real person, beats a generic template every time. I didn't have the words for that in 2019. I just had a hunch and nine measurements.