About me

Hi, there! I’m Etienne and I’m building a golf sim. This totally sounds like the beginning of some pyramid scheme or at the very least a shady affiliate site. I promise, it’s not. It’s just a build log of my journey to build a golf simulator at home.

I work in tech, you may know me from my role as co-founder and CTO of Weaviate.

Why are you building a golf sim?

Here’s the thing: I love golf. But I suck at it. My daily life is very busy and I don’t have a lot of time go play golf. At best I can get in 9 or 18 holes on a weekend. But there is no real time to practice. I want to get better at golf, but I can’t just take 3h+ out of my schedule to drive to the range and back and hit balls there. But half an hour here or there between meetings – or in the evenings – that’s totally doable.

Besides the fact that I want to improve, I think having a golf sim is also a ton of fun. Also, golf is a great way to clear my head. Being on 24/7 it’s hard to switch off and not think about work. Golf is the perfect distractor.

How much do you suck at golf?

I’m a 20-ish handicap and I’ve been playing for about 3 years. However, 3-years of start-up life really doesn’t leave a lot of time for golf. I honestly think I could be a low-single digit handicap if I had the time to practice. What makes me think that? My score cards often look like this: 3 pars in a row, followed by a 10. All I need to do (haha, easier said than done) is to get rid of the blow-up holes and become more consistent.

What is your main golf goal right now?

Better impact conditions. I tend to get flippy and then everything spirals out of control. Even when I hit the ball OK, my ball flight is way too high which means I’m struggling into the wind. The feeling of absolutely flushing a ball is just amazing. One of my goals with the sim is to get that feeling consistently.

Don’t you think taking a lesson would have a better ROI?

Where’s the fun in that? I’m not ruling out that I will take lessons in the future. But what’s the point of getting great advice and then not having the time and space to practice?

Why are you building this site?

I’m lucky to work with a few people who play golf. They are all very interested in my plans of building a sim and I thought it would be fun to document the journey. Sure I could just sent them updates on Slack, but a huge chunk of my career has been about open-source and building things out in the open. So why not do the same with this project?

Also, building a golf sim is not a small project and there are infinite possibilities and decisions to make. I want to document why I made certain decisions. Maybe this helps others who are thinking about building a sim as well.

Also, I’m expecting this site to become hugely popular and equipment manufacturers to reach out and send me free stuff. Haha, just kidding.

What are the main constraints you have to work with?

I’m planning on writing a dedicated post about this as part of the build log. But in short, my two biggest worries are ceiling height and noise. Our place shares a wall with the neighboring unit and the default sound insulation is not great. The ceiling height is also a bit of a limiting factor. There is a chance I won’t ever be able to smash driver in the sim. But honestly, I’m OK with that. Just means I’ll become Colin Morikawa rather than Bryson DeChambeau. And since launch monitors are portable, I can always take it to the range if I want to do an occasional driver session.

Why is there no new update yet?

I’m blogging this live as I’m building the sim over the next few weekends. My goal is to finish the project by the end of the year (2024). And then we can start with project “Become a good golfer” … which is probably a lot harder than just building a sim.

What’s the best course you’ve ever played?

The list of courses I’ve played is super short. One course I thoroughly enjoyed is the Presidio Golf Course in San Francisco. (This is the title pic on the home page right now, since I don’t have a pic of the finished sim yet.)

Nor-Cal blue skies in combination with the beautiful pine and eucalyptus trees make the course stunning to look at. It is also in much better condition than most courses I’m used to here in Germany. The sand in the bunkers was so soft and fluffy. And the fairways were genuinely forgiving. I struggled a bit with the green speed though, they’re much faster than what I’m used to. Haha!

What’s with the odd design choices and unusual products?

This blog is intended for an international audience and I expect the most interest to come from the US and UK. But I’m based in Germany, so I have to work with the materials and products that are available here. If you think “this guy is not building according to code” keep in mind that building codes are different everywhere and I try to adhere to regulations and best practices in Germany – because the material availability is much better this way.

What do you in real life?

Mainly building weaviate – both the company and the product. Here are some random talks that you might find interesting (they’re all super nerdy):

How are you building this site?

At the moment I’m using Hugo with the Ananke theme. This was a very spontaneous decision. I wanted something that’s widely used and well supported and looks good enough out of the box. One major requirement was that I could write posts in markdown.

So far, I really like it, although I have to say, there is a bit too much magic going on. Especially with Hugo written in Go, I expected things to rather be a bit verbose, but easy to follow. That said, the learning curve is not super steep and I think I can navigate the project well enough.

I’m also using Vercel for the first time. I have to say, the onboarding experience is super smooth. Time to value is pretty much instant. Let’s see how generous the free tier is.