Dave's Sweater 🧣

Boone, NC's #2 weather resource. Live at davessweater.com.

A satirical local-weather site that answers the important question — is it sweater weather? — and runs a "Right Ray / Wrong Ray" tracker scoring forecast accuracy (Ray's Weather vs. Open-Meteo vs. Apple Weather, plus a growing bench of free forecasters) against verified actuals on a 100-point scale. The bit: show with data that free services keep pace with — or beat — the paid one. Not affiliated with Ray's Weather; Ray's great, use his site for actual weather.

Note for contributors: There is additional background context (origin story, tone guidance, and copy direction) that is intentionally kept out of this public repo. If you're working locally and need it, ask the owner — it lives in a private/local context file, not in version control. Do not commit personal, political, third-party, or network/infrastructure details to this public repository.

Architecture

Two layers:

• Data pipeline (Python, stdlib) — daily GitHub Actions capture forecasts and actuals, then score them into data/*.json. Scoring lives in scripts/scoring.py (100-point scale, tolerance bands per field, sweater-weather logic), orchestrated by scripts/compare.py.
• Web app (Next.js 16, App Router) — reads the committed data/*.json at build time and renders the site. Vercel runs next build on every push to main; there's no committed HTML.

scripts/                # Python data pipeline (stdlib only; Playwright just for capture_rays)
  scoring.py             #   the 100-point scoring engine
  compare.py             #   orchestrates scoring + sweater-weather logic for a given date
  capture_openmeteo.py   #   Open-Meteo forecast + historical actuals
  capture_rays.py        #   Ray's Weather screenshot + scrape
  capture_iphone_weather.py  # Open-Meteo fallback for the Apple Weather slot
  export_scores_csv.py   #   scores.json → CSV
  fetch_substack.py      #   Substack RSS → cached JSON (blog)
  prepare_public.mjs     #   prebuild: latest data/predictions screenshots → public/screenshots
  # a growing bench of capture/compare scripts for road conditions, tourism demand,
  # local events, and other Boone-area signals lives alongside the core set above
data/                    # committed JSON the site reads (predictions, actuals, comparisons, scores, ...)
src/                     # Next.js app — lib/ (data, feeds, sweater, scoreboard, dates, html), components/, app/ (routes)
public/                  # served assets (logo, icons); screenshots/ generated at build
.github/workflows/       # daily_capture, daily_compare, upload_screenshot (+ a few narrower feature crons)

Site routes worth knowing: / (today's forecast + sweater verdict), /right-wrong-ray (the comparison + scoreboard), /resources (articles, news, report cards, and videos — the blog), /reports (franchise landing pages like the fireworks forecast), /methodology (how the scoring works), /shop.

Develop

npm install
npm run dev      # http://localhost:3000
npm run build    # prebuild (screenshots) + next build
npm test         # vitest
npm run lint

# Data pipeline (Python stdlib; Playwright only for capture_rays)
python scripts/capture_openmeteo.py --forecast
python scripts/capture_openmeteo.py --actuals --date 2026-03-01
python scripts/compare.py --date 2026-03-01
python scripts/compare.py --sweater-only

# Python test suite
python3 -m pytest tests/

Daily pipeline

GitHub Actions run the data pipeline and commit data/ to main every morning; each push triggers a Vercel next build:

• Daily Capture (daily_capture.yml) — Ray's screenshot + scrape, Open-Meteo forecast, iPhone fallback, plus the other capture scripts (roads, tourism demand, events, etc.) → commits data/.
• Daily Compare (daily_compare.yml) — runs after Daily Capture, fetches yesterday's actuals, scores predictions, checks capture health, exports the scores CSV → commits data/.
• iPhone Screenshot Upload (upload_screenshot.yml) — accepts an Apple Weather screenshot via the GitHub API (iOS Shortcut) → commits data/predictions/.

A few narrower feature workflows (e.g. traffic sampling) run on their own schedules alongside these two. Exact cron times live in .github/workflows/*.yml, not here — they've moved before and will again.

Deployment

Hosted on Vercel (vercel.json: framework: nextjs, outputDirectory: .next). Every push to main deploys. Domain DNS via Squarespace.

Cost

~$12/year for the domain. Hosting + Actions are free-tier.

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Dave's Sweater is not affiliated with Ray's Weather. Ray's great — use his site for actual weather.