About slope.no

Hi! I’m Gudjon Gudjonsson, and slope.no started – like so many projects – with a small annoyance.

My home club, Atlungstad Golfklubb, published its slope tables as images on the club website. Fine on paper in the clubhouse, but try reading a photograph of a densely packed number table on your phone while standing on the first tee with your glove half on! It just didn’t work.

So I did what any golfer with a bit too much interest in computers would do: I built a WordPress plugin that calculated the playing handicap directly – pick a tee, enter your handicap, done. Built for Atlungstad, in use at atlungstadgolf.no.

Then it struck me: this would be handy for every course I play – and I play a lot of golf. 😉 That’s when the real work began: rebuilding the system to support many clubs and countries, and the never-ending task of finding slope, course rating and par for course after course after course …

I added every course in Norway and a good number of Swedish ones without thinking much more about it – the site was just out there. Until one day I opened the statistics and discovered that people were actually using it. Lots of them. And remarkably many from Sweden! That was perhaps the most fun moment of the whole project: having built something people find useful.

So I rolled up my sleeves. Today slope.no covers most courses in Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark and Finland. And since the phone is in the golf bag anyway, there is now also a dedicated app, even quicker than the browser.

Missing a course? Search for it on the front page – if it isn’t there, a form pops up so you can submit it on the spot. Ideas or errors? Get in touch – this project runs on the joy of golf.

More about me and other things I do at gudjonsson.com.