We had a trail race that compromised of running a 4 mile loop every hour for up to 12 hours. The race has 100 runners so decided the RFID aerial system was overkill so I created a simple to manage Google Sheet. We had to enter a value against a runner if they had failed the current lap. I then created a React Website to read the Google Sheet and present the race progress data in realtime.

The website sat in a Docker container stack using Express for routing and a JS API for providing the link between website and Google Sheet. I added in a 20 second cache to the API to avoid hitting the Sheets API read limit.