At its heart, Scootercam has always been a hobbyist’s project. For more than ten years, it’s been my place to share weather data and images from the Lake Michigan shoreline. Just as important, it’s been a place to learn—learning to write code, and using that code to turn data and images into something useful or beautiful. Along the way, that’s meant timelapse videos, detailed weather stats, timely alerts, and a few things you don’t usually find on a weather site: sunset beauty predictions based on conditions here and to our west, moon tables, and a custom sunset capture system built specifically for this location.
Over time, Scootercam became less a single site and more a collection of one-off applications, scripts, and experiments that somehow kept running. It worked—but it wasn’t pretty. With considerable help from AI, I began translating that tangle of scripts into a smaller set of custom WordPress plugins, hoping to create a cleaner, more maintainable foundation. Instead, I found myself adding layers of framework and overhead around a fairly simple set of tasks.
As Scootercam approaches its 10-year anniversary this May, the site has come full circle. It’s returning to its custom-PHP roots, again with AI as a guide. Nearly everything on the server side has been rewritten and refactored recently, with the goal of a simpler, more durable system. Going forward, Scootercam will also serve as a WordPress developer’s journal and a living site manual—documenting design decisions, architecture, and lessons learned for future admins (including future-me). That material will roll out as things stabilize. A few small bugs may still surface along the way. Thanks for being here, and for being part of Scootercam’s first decade.
