Show HN: SwellSlots – Grid Based Surf Forecast App with a Street Fighter 2 UI

Show HN: SwellSlots – Grid Based Surf Forecast App with a Street Fighter 2 UI(swellslots.com)

4 points by rawoke083600 41 days ago | 2 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

dolder14 41 days 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

rawoke083600 41 days ago | |

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

Will look at readability.