When I started doing amateur radio seriously, in gaming the idea of ‘achievements’ became a big thing - little markers on your account or user that indicated you had completed some preset set of objectives. Finished a level, defeated a boss, or just took part in an event. The important thing was they covered a large scope of different things - there were easy ones (finish the first level) and hard ones (complete the game using only one hand), as well as whimsical ones (collect in game items that had no effect on winning or loosing). They became massive, because they drove people both to do more, and have something to aim for, and once you had completed it, - and I saw the opportunity to do something similar for Amateur Radio.

At the time, the various log collection websites and QSL exchange sites did not really support much - there are those sites that have achievements, but they’re long term goals. - Work every state in the US, work every country in Europe. I wanted something that gave you mid way goals, achievements for succeeding your first contact, your first 10k contact distance, things that celebrated QRP and the casual radio ham.

I admit apart from buying the domain, the idea parked itself for a while - real life, work, family took precedence. But in 2022, my daughter got her licence. She had the idea of doing a family competition (my father, me, her) on how many maidenhead squares we could contact in December. And it was a friendly thing - not how many we could contact each, but between us.

It was amazing - my dad had been trying to work in US states, and had mostly spent the year listening and waiting for those contacts, but suddenly he was active again, making QSO’s with hundreds of European and Asian contacts.

And I realised that the code I had written to parse and merge our logbooks was the start of hamchievements. And so, in late December 2022, and January 2023, Hamchievements was born.