SeaStatus: iOS On-the-Go Marine Weather App

Background

We conceptualized and built a dynamic Ruby on Rails application providing personalized marine weather data for SeaStatus. The project all the way from proof of concept to minimum viable product (MVP) in just two months. We utilized Regex to parse weather data based on user time zones and locations—and aggregated raw data from diverse datasets (NOAA, Dark Sky, PlanetOS) to populate text and charts. We engineered iOS and Android apps with a JavaScript cross-platform framework to manage one codebase more efficiently and cost-effectively.

Challenge

Since SeaStatus originated as a pre-seed startup, this meant that cost, developer resources, and time-to-market were very important factors in the engineering of a solution. We used popular open-source libraries and frameworks with large support communities wherever possible to save cost, and also decided to go with a cross-platform framework (Ionic) to deliver application versions for web, iOS, and Android primarily using JavaScript to avoid having to develop in 3 separate programming languages. Additionally, because we wanted to launch the application as quickly as possible, we focused on using 3rd party APIs to gather tha marine weather data, and a flexible back-end on Google Cloud to cover the user personalization piece.



Solution

We managed a codebose for both iOS and Android apps that aggregates raw data from NOAA, Darksky, PlanetOS, WeatherFlow, and Worldtides to populate marine weather charts. We also used Amazon CloudFront (CDN) to cache responses for 1 hour to make location data really fast to load. We also built a Ruby on Rails application on Google Cloud to handle the fetching of data that uses delayed jobs (in memory for the fastest response time) to create 4+ jobs to fetch data from different datasets and stores the results in a Firestore database. Finally, we developed cloud functions (Node.js) to schedule push notification reports based on user-selected timezones.

Success

We launched the SeaStatus MVP in 2 months of development time, and won a $25,000 prize from the Big Ocean Button Challenge! SeaStatus is still going strong to this day and was even acquired by Sofar Ocean Technologies for a successful startup exit!

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