A golf log, kept honestly
I took up golf in 2025. GolfAlong is my log: every round from the watch on my wrist and the card in my pocket, every course mapped from open data before I play it.
Who plays
Patrik, that is me: I keep the log and wear a Galaxy Watch Ultra 2, which records GPS on two frequencies (L1 and L5).
Jeff plays often and sends his rounds in from an Apple Watch Series 10, which records GPS on one frequency (L1), so expect his line to wander more than mine, most of all under trees. His name shows and his walks and pace publish. His scores stay private for now, and his heart rate never enters the data at all.
GolfAlong is the sibling of HikeAlong, the same idea applied to a sunrise hike every week. The two share their tools, not their look.
How a round becomes a page
Two files per round, per player. The watch writes a GPX file: the route and the clock, second by second. It knows nothing about golf. The scorecard, copied into a short text file the same day, holds what no sensor records: strokes, putts, fairways, penalties, the tees, and conditions when someone measured them.
The build does the rest. It splits the track into holes, measures the time and the distance on foot for each one, and adds up the card. Totals, putts per round, fairways hit, greens in regulation and every trend are computed from the raw strokes. None of them are typed in, so none can drift.
A hole the build cannot place with confidence keeps its score and loses its timing. A number nobody recorded is left out, never filled with zero.
Where the course maps come from
Holes, greens, tees, fairways, bunkers, water and cart paths come from OpenStreetMap, drawn by volunteers and shared under the Open Database License. The ground comes from the USGS 3D Elevation Program's 1 m lidar, which is public domain. Every hole profile, green size and green tilt on a course page is worked out from those two sources and nothing else.
Nothing comes from a course's own website, a golf app or a yardage book. The length of a hole along its mapped line is shown as that, never as the card yardage. Card yardage and tee names come from a photograph of the real scorecard.
What the site will not claim
- Where a ball went. Maps show where people walked and rode. No shot tracking, drive distances, landing zones or dispersion.
- Conditions nobody measured. Green speed is a stimpmeter reading or it is not a number. A course with no report has no report, not good conditions.
- A handicap. An official Handicap Index comes only through an authorized golf association. Any estimate here will say so.
- Expertise. I am new to the game. The progress page shows the bad rounds with the good ones.
The watches record it. It never publishes unless a round says so, and a playing partner's is stripped before anything is stored.
Playing together is worked out from the two tracks, never entered. Each player's walk has its own line style, so the two read apart in grayscale too.
The log starts with public and daily fee courses, the ones anyone can book.