weather-app

Rain or Shine

A lite Weather App using The Open Weather Map API

Enter your city in the search bar, the APi will send back the temparature, weather conditions and local time.

There is also a "see more" feature that shows additional details like sunset/sunrise time.

Built with Vite, React, Typescript, Redux and Tailwind

The API is being called with NodeJS and Express

Project was inspired by Konstantin Münster via a Medium article on organizing a React project

The article gives an overview of how to plan a React project. How to organize your components with the folder structure

Project Status

Sept 1. 2022 Successfully launched the app, the backend works with the front end :))

Sept 3. 2022 "night time" feature where the UI gets dark based on the loca time of the city called

Sept 6. 2022 added a second api call to the server.js

Currently working on building

• a current location feature that will require a second API call
• geolocation to make the search bar more dynamic

Sept 10, 2022 SECURING THE SERVER

• Added access log for each api call
• Recording the IP address and performance time
• Added a log for all errors
• Rate-limiting the user to prevent overwhelming calls to the API
• Caching data, improving the performance of calls significantly

Project Screen Shot(s)

Installation and Setup Instructions

Clone down this repository. You will need node and npm installed globally on your machine.

Installation:

Clone Project

gh repo clone oswhytecodes/weather-app

npm install

To Start Server:

npm run dev

To Visit App:

localhost:3000/

Reflection

• What was the context for this project?

  This was a side project to practice the features in a small frontend project.

  Using Redux to hold the state, and NodeJS to hide the API key and call the weather API

• What did you set out to build?

  I set out to build a simple weather app to showcase my design and programmingn skills.

• Why was this project challenging and therefore a really good learning experience?

  The weather app was challenging as I am now using Typescript, Redux, NodeJS and hosting the backend on AWS.

  Learning about epoch and utc time and converting these numbers to the local time of the cities searched.

• What were some unexpected obstacles?

  I never ever imagined working with NodeJS and hosting a backend server. I am still in awe of the amount of work I put into building this project out.

• What tools did you use to implement this project?

  The React App was built with Vite, installed Tailwind, Typescript, Redux, DateFormat, Axios, Node JS, Express, cors etc