Turns out Automation is neat. After some fairly manic coding, much trial and error, and some grave computing sins (DevOps folks look away), I’ve set up a Pipeline for automatically generating hurricane pages on this site. Google Cloud Platform is the MVP here, housing all of the processing pipeline, and (so far) the completely in the free tier. So now new hurricanes will be automatically added to the site as they’re tracked by NOAA, and current storms will reflect (more or less) the latest forecasts.

NOAA RSS Feeds Well, actually they’re Atom feeds I guess, but they’re basically interchangeable, the library I use handles both automagically, and people know what RSS is. This is more about parsing the data than a web format, so here’s a wikipedia link if you care about that. So, NOAA publishes a ton of data using their feeds, in a few formats. Some is historical data, some is re-analyzed data, graphics, GIS, etc etc.

Well, this was a hard one. So, those nice maps on each Hurricane page, I made those in a fantastic open source program called QGIS. I’ve been using QGIS on and off for years, and it has consistently been up to the GIS tasks I throw at it. When I had access to ArcGIS, I’d frequently use QGIS for things ArcGIS couldn’t do easily (or that was behind a paid add-on), and when I drew the short straw and lost the ArcGIS seat no one else could tell the difference.