As a surfer I am always looking at raw data about wind and waves in order to make an informed decision about where I will surf on any given day. If you take a look at the websites that are out there now that cater to surfers, the focus is really on the analysis of raw data and telling people what they should or shouldn’t think with only a little bit of access to raw data and information. This ultimately leads to inaccuracies in forecasting which create all sorts of problems.
The purpose of this site is to bring pertinent raw data for surfers all into a single application. A given person will be able to access the site and see a set of data that is relevant to the location that they live in, and then they will eventually be able to customize that data to be relevant to their interests. This will allow surfers to make better decisions about where and when to surf.
I originally built this site for my final project for bootcamp way back in 2016. I used PHP and MySQL for the backend and vanilla javascript for the front end. Since 2016, I’ve changed and so have the technologies that I work with daily. I wanted to build a site that would be a good reflection of my technical abilities as well as give me an opportunity work with some technologies that I enjoy working with. I have alot of experience with react and I really enjoy working with react so I decided to use react for the front end. I have some experience with nextjs and I wanted to futher my knowledge of its inner workings, so I decided to use nextjs for the server side.