Skycast is a weather lookup site and the first Node.js project I built after finishing the ITI web track in autumn 2020. Type a city or an address, or click one button to use your device’s location, and it shows the current weather.
What it does
- Search any place. The address is geocoded with the Mapbox Geocoding API, then the coordinates are sent to a weather API.
- Use my location. The browser’s Geolocation API supplies the coordinates directly.
- Server-rendered pages with Handlebars, plus a JSON endpoint at
/weather?address=that the page calls, so the same backend could serve another client.
How it is built
The server is Express with hbs views and two small utility modules: one for geocoding and one for the forecast, each wrapping an HTTP call and normalising the response. Errors from either service are turned into a plain message in the JSON response rather than a stack trace. The Mapbox token is read from the MAPBOX_TOKEN environment variable.
What I learned
Chaining two third-party APIs, geocoding then weather, and handling the failure of either one cleanly was the core lesson. It is a tiny project, but “call a service, validate what came back, call the next one” is the shape of a lot of backend work, and this is where I first wrote it deliberately.
Source in the repository.