Let's Kite V3, on the 3rd round

Let's Kite will celebrate the start of August its 4 years of existence and what an adventure it has become over the years! From a small personal project that aimed to gather the few spots in the Romandie region and the few weather stations, it has become over the years a real reference guide.
In the first year, Let's Kite displayed about 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, it's just crazy. And for 2022, it continues to grow month after month.

Let's talk a little technical
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 proved to be quite tedious. So I decided to develop a tool for weather station data acquisition, content management for spots, the agenda, the directory while keeping the public part (the frontend) in wordpress. That's how the site ran for almost the last 4 years, and it 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 debugging. 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 run a server 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 tackle a complete overhaul of the site to use only 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 the users, I opened a beta version of the site to see how the new version was received. I also take this opportunity to thank those who took the time to test and give me feedback. In fact, there were few bugs but lots of small improvement requests. And I haven't finished improving all of this yet, but taking a tour of Let's Kite version 2, I noticed that there were the same kind of bugs, but that the beta version (the one you see 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