Show HN: SwellSlots – Grid Based Surf Forecast App with a Street Fighter 2 UI (opens in new tab)

(swellslots.com)

4 pointsrawoke0836001mo ago2 comments

I discovered surfing last year in my early 40's its been a journey and a half and more fun than taking up golf at my age.

SwellSlots squeezes swell height, period, wind speed/direction, and tide state into a color-coded weekly grid. One glance tells you when conditions are 'good' for the next few days.

I wanted it to look completely different to what was out there (UI wise), as most of the forecast apps looks very clinical and cold.

Some technical details:

- SvelteKit + TailwindCSS 4, deployed on Hetzner (LOVE their cloud-console-ux! So simple)

- 2,000+ surf spots worldwide (sourced via a separate AI-assisted pipeline I call "Surf Scout" — got ~80% accuracy, rest is manual curation)

- The spot database was its own challenge — Google Maps couldn't distinguish surf beaches from swim beaches, and LLMs got about 75–80% of the way there

I'd really appreciate feedback on:

- Is the grid scannable enough on first visit?

- Any surf spots missing from your area?

- What else would you like to see?

EDIT - Formatting

2 comments

dolder141mo ago

Fun take on a surf forecast, nice job.

grid is scannable, but the background makes the readability a bit much (to read/scan quickly).

Santa Cruz area is missing spots (refer to Surfline for all the in-betweens between the lane and the hook).

Cams are king - if there are any public cams to tap into, that's the Hadouken

rawoke083600OP1mo ago

Ahh thank you for checking it out. Yea the surf spots turned out to be the hard part.

Will look at readability.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse