Snippet: Say Hello to Weather Machine ☇

Trevor Turk and Jonas Downey on the Hello Weather blog:

If you’ve ever tried to use a weather API, you probably already know the challenges. Weather APIs are notoriously complicated—every vendor offers their own proprietary data structures and request formats, and they vary in performance, price, accuracy, and reliability. Sometimes services disappear or get shut down entirely. It’s complex, time-consuming, and expensive to work with these systems, which distracts from the main thing you’re trying to do: building a great app!

We learned about all of this the hard way. For the past several years, we’ve spent countless hours developing a sophisticated multi-provider architecture for Hello Weather, to solve these problems for ourselves.

Hello Weather has been a favorite of mine for years and I think it’s delightful to see innovation in this space. The fact that Weather Machine is a drop-in replacement for the soon-to-be-dead Dark Sky API is a bonus that should help a handful of developers, too.