Featured Community Plugin: Hourly Weather
This post is part of a series, featuring the incredible work of plugin authors who grow the TRMNL plugin ecosystem with every contribution. The TRMNL team has individually selected these plugins and authors to be featured.
Hourly Weather Plugin
In monsoon season, what's happening in the weather this week is less important than what is happening within the next 6 hours. That's why Ronak, a TRMNL engineer, selected the Hourly Weather plugin by Shriram Datar as a featured plugin, because when it's important, you want to make sure you can see it before it's too late. Here's what Shiram had to say, in their own words.
Why did you want this plugin to exist?
I remember the moment this idea clicked. It suddenly started raining at my place during a month when it wasn’t expected, and my wife sighed and asked if I could make something that shows the weather for the next few hours, every day. That’s when I thought... there wasn’t any plugin at the time that showed a simple next-6-hours weather forecast. That gap is what pushed me to build it.
How did you balance look vs functionality?
I tried to keep a good balance between both, but functionality was slightly more important for this plugin. Since it’s focused on near-term weather, the goal was to make the most important information easy to read, at a glance, while still keeping the layout clean.
What was your process for creating the plugin?
I started with writing API endpoints and then slowly creating the UI after that. I primarily used Cloudflare as hosting and Git to maintain the code.
What, if any, challenges did you face while creating it?
I think for me personally, getting correct data was more important. I actually spoke with 40-50 people from different regions and asked them about weather providers and then decided to go with the one that was the most accurate for majority of people. (Google Weather API)
Did you learn anything that you want to apply to future or past recipes?
- If you are using a paid api as your data source, add a good abstraction layer on the top of that.
- Add your own cache layer to avoid extra costs.
- Talk with people on discord, They are so good at they do and they will guide you in as much as possible.
What is your favorite plugin that someone else created and why?
Simple Calendar. It's just so beautiful and dead simple. Lives up to it's name. It's the ideal, no fuss plugin that looks beautiful and works perfectly.
