Surf Trip Finder.
WAVES
WIND
TIDE
LIGHT
GO
Surf Trip Finder.
A friend sent a joke into the surf group chat. Three hours later it was software.
The joke was a reel — some guy in Bali had automated his surf checks: good waves detected, villas found, trip package dropped into the group chat with dates. Funny. Except we surf North Devon, one of my closest friends lives there, and the group chat has the same standing question every week: is the weekend worth the drive?
First commit at five past midnight. By three in the morning the pipeline ran end to end: marine forecasts from three wave models, wind ensembles, tide extremes from two tide authorities, bank holidays — pulled twice a day, scored, and pushed to my phone as a WhatsApp-ready overview with a poll. One tap and the group chat gets its answer: Go, Worth it, Marginal, or Skip.
The scoring is the real work. Every beach, every day, every ability tier gets a 0–100 score across wave-size fit, wind, swell period, tide window, safety, weather, daylight — with hard exclusions that zero a day out when the face height is beyond the tier or the wind turns onshore past twenty miles an hour. Four beaches share one offshore forecast; what separates them is spot logic — wind shelter, tide behaviour, who each break actually suits. On top sits a separate confidence rating: model agreement, run-to-run stability, wind-ensemble spread, lead time. The system tells you the call and how much to trust it.
Then the rest of the group woke up. One friend had moved to Australia — by late morning Sydney East was live. Another is in New York — Rockaway followed the same day. Adding a region is one JSON file: beaches, coordinates, timezone, holiday calendar. Zero engine changes. No servers either — the whole thing runs on scheduled workflows and commits its own state back to git.
