by Contat Fred - Posted on 12/1/18 || Modifié le 2/19/24
Let's Kite is about to celebrate its 4th anniversary at the beginning of August, and what an adventure it has become over the years! From a small personal project aimed at gathering a few kite spots in the Romandie region and some weather beacons, it has become a true reference guide.
In the first year, Let's Kite displayed around 75,000 pages, which was already a great score for a local kite site. In 2021, the site displayed over 310,000 pages for about 38,000 kiters, which is just amazing. And for 2022, it continues to grow month by month.
Let's talk a little tech
Originally, the very first version of the site ran on a well-known blog engine, Wordpress. But acquiring weather station data every 10 minutes quickly became tedious. So I decided to have a weather station data acquisition tool, content management for the spots, the calendar, the directory developed, while keeping the public part (the frontend) in wordpress. That's how the site has been running for almost 4 years, and I had to maintain 2 sites, the backend in Symfony and the Frontend in Wordpress. Quite a hassle, especially when it came to implementing new features or chasing a bug. I also noticed that with the increase in the amount of data, the site could take up to 8 seconds to load 100%. Not great to have a server running for 8 seconds just to display a page for a user.
The beginning of change
So in October 2020, I decided to get my hands dirty and start a complete overhaul of the site to only use the Symfony framework. The challenge was first to learn Symfony and php, because from my side I had good notions in php, but not enough to develop a complete site. So a job that should have taken me 4 months actually took me a year and a half (There were long breaks!!!). Recently, to confront myself with the users, I opened a beta version of the site to see how the new version was received. I take this opportunity to thank those who took the time to test and give me feedback. In fact, there were very few bugs but a lot of small improvement requests. And I haven't finished improving all of that yet, but by taking a look at version 2 of Let's Kite, I noticed that there were the same kind of bugs, but the beta version (the one you are seeing now) was still much better.
So despite my perfectionist side, I decided to release a V3 that is not quite perfect...
Welcome to the new Let's Kite
Fred - Wind activist