About Tides Today

Before talking about the site, I'll tell you a little about me. I'm Ste - a Software Engineer based in Manchester, England. Having grown up on the beautiful North Wales coast and spending many happy childhood days at sea with my Dad, the sea has always been part of me.

The site came about to as a union of two of my loves; my career in software development and the sea. There are plenty of tide websites out there, which do an excellent job, so it begs the question, why create a tide website? The answer is simple, purely as an engineering exercise. This site allows me to try new technologies, improve my skills and ultimately develop my career. The site and the associated systems behind it, handle lots of data. Serving this data up to hundreds of thousands of users tests (and therefore pushes) me and my abilities.

I have a love for the sea, so I've worked hard to try and create a website and experience that I'd use myself. So with this as well as feedback from you, the community which has helped me build this site, I aim to push things forward and provide an experience you won't forget.

To find out more about me and my other projects, feel free to visit my website.

The Road Map

I'm constantly working on TIdes Today, bringing new features and improvements. I share my roadmap online, feel free to take a look at the Roadmap Trello board and get in touch if you have any ideas.

» See the Road Map

How Tides Today works - the geeky stuff

Tides today is made up of several systems which each have an important part to play in delivering tide times for over 7,000 locations world-wide. If you're interested (or a recruiter who wants to give me a job) here's a brief summary of what does what:

• Data miner - this micro service pulls tide readings from various suppliers from across the world. The data from these are added to a message queue for processing.
• Data consumer - another micro service which is responsible for sorting through the collected data, doing any conversions where suppliers provide raw data and storing it. There are over 400,000 records processed every day.
• The API - The API (application programming interface) this is the system that provides the website and the WordPress plugin with the data to present.
• The Website - The website is how you interact with the data for the 7,000 locations. The site relies on caching servers, elasticsearch and other APIs (such as Prismic which provides content managed sections like this) and search providers.
• The CDN and WAF - The site is protected by CloudFlare which provides a Web Application Firewall and Content Delivery System which keeps the site online and secure across the world.