Post

I built waterlevels.org to solve a niche problem I had (looking up water level data for bodies of water near me.) Cursor has become so good that, after I shipped V1, I've done nearly 100% of the bug fixes and improvements on my iPhone. I'm surprised by how quick I can turn those things around, now.

Aggregating USGS data is a time-consuming process, but historical numbers are slowly trickling in when there's cap space after pulling the last-hour's measurements.

More importantly, it's built on boring technology. Rails. Tailwind. Hotwire. Heroku.

Once I get enough historical data, I can start displaying trends and larger changes over time, things like "%lake% hasn't been this low since %year%." or "the last time %river% flooded this much was 48 years ago.")

It's a uniquely nerdy thing to build, and I don't expect many people to use it, but it's there if you want it. I've finally dialed in most-recent measurement fetches, so if a location is still missing historical data, it'll at least be _current_.