Snow Depth: A Simple Status App for Ski Resorts

The Snow Depth project was a lightweight web app that showed the latest snow measurements at ski resorts in Turkey on a single page.

Instead of checking multiple websites manually, users could quickly see where conditions were best before planning a trip.

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Problem: Fragmented and Unclear Information

For people planning a ski trip, the main problem was finding recent and comparable data:

• Each resort published information in different places and formats,
• It was hard to know how fresh the data was,
• Comparing resorts required opening many tabs and doing mental math.

Users essentially wanted to answer one question:
“Where is there enough snow today, and how up‑to‑date is this information?”

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Solution: One List View with Freshness Indicator

The Snow Depth app:

• Pulled the latest snow depths from a database,
• Listed each resort with its city and measured depth,
• Calculated how many minutes ago the data was updated.

The interface used:

• A Bootstrap‑based responsive list,
• Clear resort names and location labels,
• A badge‑style snow depth on the right,
• A short line such as “updated X minutes ago” to show freshness.

At a glance, users could both compare depths and trust recency.

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Approach: Lightweight Backend, Focused UX

On the technical side, the app used:

• A small PHP backend,
• A relational database for resorts and measurements,
• Simple queries to fetch the most recent record per resort.

Because the app solved exactly one problem, both the UI and the codebase remained small and maintainable.

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Outcome

With Snow Depth:

• Skiers could track conditions from a single screen instead of multiple sites,
• Decisions about destination and timing became faster,
• The freshness indicator increased trust in the numbers shown.

It is a good example of a narrow “weather‑style” tool that removes friction from real‑world decisions with a minimal interface.