what is wx.watch

This post was originally posted as a thread on the wx.watch Mastodon account.

I guess I’ll start at the beginning. What is wx.watch?

Short answer: I want to make staying up-to-date with NWS weather alerts easier.

Longer answer: In 2009, I didn’t have a smart phone, but wanted to be as weather alert as possible. This was before NWS was on Twitter or emergency phone alerts were a thing so, I set up IFTTT to send me a text message whenever NWS added a new alert item to an ATOM feed for the area that covered my college. Versions of this setup worked well for most of the last decade but changes at IFTTT kinda forced my hand.

When I started using IFTTT, the feed was supposedly being checked every 15 minutes (or more often). For weather alerts timeliness is everything and since I was using IFTTT for free I didn’t mind a mild time delay. Unfortunately, over time this frequency would start slipping. By the end of my use of IFTTT I was getting alerts hours after they were issued, rendering them pretty worthless.

I was also benefitting from the fact that I could get the results delivered via SMS which did come at some cost to IFTTT. In the later years, I’d occasionally get emails from IFTTT asking if I still wanted to get SMS and I’d always say yes. Eventually they deprecated SMS entirely and so I had to migrate to push notifications from their app. Those were okay for a while, but like I said in my previous post they lost all relevance when they started getting delivered with significant delay.

I definitely was heading for a breaking point around 2020 until I remembered I could get push notifications for nwstulsa on Twitter. After that, Twitter became my primary notification method with the delayed IFTTT service as a backup. Since you’re reading this on the Fediverse I’ll skip the finer details of why Twitter stopped being my primary method, but suffice it to say I felt lost.

On an unusually stormy February day, I got inspired to build my own Mastodon bot. Using the same ancient ATOM feed I used in college, I built an auto-posting bot using a low-code tool in just a few hours. It worked! I was getting severe weather push alerts from my Mastodon app that same day. I launched the account on a local instance and set it loose.

I was pretty content to slowly but surely refine it until I started getting into React/NextJS development. I wanted to get off low-code and make something native yet serverless. Thus project “weathertrunk” was born. As a new dev, I’ve been slowly but surely been figuring out how to get things working in NextJS but it’s absolutely been shaping up to be able to be much bigger than I thought it could be, especially when I realized there’s an open Weather.gov API. That was a mindblowing moment.

I was pretty content to slowly but surely refine it until I started getting into React/NextJS development. I wanted to get off low-code and make something native yet serverless. Thus project “weathertrunk” was born. As a new dev, I’ve been slowly but surely been figuring out how to get things working in NextJS but it’s absolutely been shaping up to be able to be much bigger than I thought it could be, especially when I realized there’s an open Weather.gov API. That was a mindblowing moment.

So that’s what I’m building now. I’m going to build a better, mobile-friendly way to get alerts in a comfortable way and then have the right interface to see them in full as you want to. It might not be enough for everybody but it’s what I’ve craved and I hope it’s able to help people be safer (and fight weather anxiety with data).

I hope you’ll follow this account and join me in this journey. Thanks!