Overview
Since graduating Fullstack, I've been attending Mintbean 4-hour Hackathons to keep consistent practice in coding. I created Weather'd during one of these events. The only parameters we were given was to use a public weather API to source our data. After comparing a few APIs, I thought OpenWeatherMap was the best choice, due to its easy-to-follow documentation and a free usage plan. This was my first time working with a public API instead of creating my own RESTful APIs and database models.
Through this project, I learned the importance of prioritization and time management. I wanted to challenge myself to build a responsive CSS from scratch and boy, did that eat up a lot of time. With most of my time spent on styling, I was left with an underwhelming amount of information being sent to my app so I knew I wanted to continue working on it. I gathered feedback from friends and gained insight to issues I overlooked during coding. This led to user experience improvements like city/state autocomplete suggestions, a cleaned-up user interface, more weather data and animations from GSAP.
While I know weather apps are not a novel idea, I'm really proud of what I accomplished in the span of a couple hours and beyond. For future enhancements, I'm going to add hourly weather information and have the background update based on the time day or weather conditions.
