A while ago, I wanted a personal page where I could look at the Storm Prediction Center’s (SPC’s) Day 1 to 3 Convective Outlooks in a specific format that was (and still is, actually) useful to me. I figured that I would put it on the public portion of my website in case anyone else thought it was useful (note that my website is all public now, except for a few items that just don’t have links to them). After some effort, I had a working PHP page showing the desired content.
The page usually worked well, except for a few special cases I hadn’t really accounted for, until about five years ago. I think the SPC made some change that essentially broke the PHP program’s ability to read and decode the information. Revising the PHP code to fix both the reading problem and the other issues that had been discovered turned out to be nigh unto impossible, however. The project went dormant for several years, until I discovered, and learned, the Rust programming language. In the meantime, SPC added new ways of getting the outlooks, so with Rust’s handy geography library and the new SPC files, the project was restarted a few months ago. After a moderate amount of testing (Rust’s features generally reduce the amount of testing that is needed!), the webpage is now live again! Here’s hoping that there weren’t any bugs just waiting for this opportunity to appear…!
Comic that graphically and humorously compares 8 programming languages