Why “turbocrimp”?
A crimp is a small edge you hold with your fingertips. A turbocrimp is what happens when you crimp it as hard as you possibly can: thumb locked over, everything you’ve got, to the death. It’s a term you hear around the bouldering wall, and it felt like the right energy for a site about hard little problems on home walls.
It’s also a nerdy double meaning. The site is built with Turbopack, the bundler behind Next.js, and lives in a Turborepo monorepo. Turbo build tools, turbo crimps.
What it is
A site for logging and browsing boulder problems on home and gym climbing walls. Wall owners upload a photo and mark the holds, setters create problems on it, and climbers log sends, suggest grades and compete on leaderboards. On symmetrical walls, problems can be climbed on either side, and each side is its own tick.
Why build another one?
There are good climbing wall apps already. The main reason for building this one was the randomiser: hit a button and get a fresh problem generated from the holds on your wall, with starts near the bottom and finishes near the top. On a home wall you’ve climbed a hundred times, that’s the fastest way to find something new.
Owning the whole stack also means owning the data, which opens up features a closed app wouldn’t prioritise. Some ideas on the list:
- Randomised problems weighted towards holds that are never or rarely used.
- A heatmap of which holds get used most across a wall’s problems.
- More stats on a wall: grade spread, popular holds, what’s getting sent.
Who makes it
turbocrimp is a hobby project by one climber who writes code, built for a home wall and opened up to anyone else with one. It’s in beta, so expect rough edges. Bugs, ideas and feature requests are welcome at anthony@turbocrimp.com.
Built with
- Next.js + Turbopack · the web app and its bundler
- Turborepo + pnpm · the monorepo and workspaces
- Hono + GraphQL Yoga · the GraphQL API
- Cloudflare Workers · where the API runs
- Cloudflare D1 + R2 · the database and wall photos
- Clerk · authentication
FAQ
- What does turbocrimp mean?
- In climbing, a turbocrimp is crimping a small edge as hard as you possibly can, full send and fingers be damned. The name is also a nod to the tools the site is built with: Turbopack, the bundler, and Turborepo, which manages the monorepo.
- What is turbocrimp?
- A site for logging and browsing boulder problems on home and gym climbing walls. Wall owners upload a photo and mark the holds, setters create problems on it, and climbers log sends, suggest grades and compete on leaderboards.
- Is turbocrimp free?
- Yes. Browsing and logging sends are free, and every account can set up one wall. More walls are available on request.