🛠️ best weather in...

Best Weather In... is a tiny web app that answers the question: when is the weather perfect, too hot, or too cold in any city around the world?

Check out the results for Toronto vs, say, Tokyo.

Be sure to check out the interactive map (particularly, to see "nice places" shift with the seasons).

Also, check out the FAQ for an explanation of how things were calculated, from which I highlight two figures:

1) The temperature-humidity combinations that were used to determine if "the weather" was nice or not: 2) The analysis used to determine the graph for each city:

History

Canna and I were doing the digital nomad thing starting in early 2017. Our first foray was to Japan (in last February of 2017), and... we underdressed and had to buy warmer clothes to survive our first few weeks in Tokyo. Oh well... no big deal.

But, one year later, when traveling to Taipei, we made the exact same mistake (and again, had to buy warmer clothes - I still have a pair of Taiwanese Long Johns that are comically short on me).

Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice... I build an app to never be fooled again.

This motivation happened to coincide with me being frustrated with the quick-and-dirty prototyping we had been doing for some of our ventures. I wanted to build something small, with a lot of polish; do the best I can, and give in to all my perfectionist desires. Cue a week of fervent coding.

I eventually gathered the courage to post it on Reddit, resulting in several thousand visitors, who entered hundreds of cities from around the world (and costing me ~$200 in API costs).

I didn't initially plan for anything else, but once I saw that I had the "perfect weather" data for hundreds of cities, I realized I could map it:

...and, as a bonus of having the map, I discovered the ~15 places where the weather is perfect all year round:

• Islands off the west coast of North Africa
  • Funchal, Madeira
  • The Canary Islands
• Africa
  • Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
  • Nairobi, Kenya
• Oceania
  • Lord Howe Island (off the east coast of Australia)
• Central America:
  • Jaco, Costa Rica
    • Boquete, Panama
    • Panajachel, Guatemala
    • Puerto Escondido, Mexico
    • Puebla City, Mexico
    • Mexico City, Mexico (and nearby: Guanajuato and Guadalajara) -
• South America:
  • Belo Horizonte, Brazil
  • Quito, Ecuador (and nearby Loja, Cuenca)
  • Bogota, Colombia (and nearby Armenia)

Users on Reddits whinged on about how "my idea of good weather isn't universal"; but I hold to my approach. People who say "28 isn't hot!" are likely from a place without humidity. Or, they've forgotten what nice means. Temperature means nothing without humidity. My "perfect zone" used for the calculations was based on multiple research papers that studied peoples' reaction to different temperature-humidity combinations (and serves as the basis for building indoor air quality standards). Yes, one can adapt slightly, but it only results in minor shifts of the edges of the zone. This summer (2025), I've been collecting data while out and about, and my perception of the weather, and I re-affirmed the general correctness of the original temperature-humidity "perfect zone". (Perfect science, no notes. /s)

Sadly, DarkSky (whose API I was using) was bought by Apple and they shut down their API, so the Best Weather site is frozen to whatever data it had as of early 2023.

Looking back, I'm still pretty proud of...

• the UX for the slider on the map page
• the general aesthetics
• how the graphs adapt to narrow screens
• the analysis process and visualizations
  • (if I did this a few years later, I would say I was doing "data science" and building an "AI model")
• the transparent/ergonomic api caching code

Plans

If I were to work on this any further...

• combine the map view and search page
• find a new api to use
• take into account sunlight and rain