Thoughtful Software

Recently, I released v1.0 of my first Craftemy package, craftemy/weatherstack! This library serves to interact with the weatherstack API and provide easy-to-understand methods to fetch current and historical weather information.

Weatherstack is a service that serves current and historical weather information for international locations, and after Dark Sky's API was announced for retirement, it's the service that my company ended up switching to. As a thought exercise, I wanted to try and write a library that I would want to use to interact with an external service, and the API was limited enough to be able to contain all relevant methods into one option.

Now, I decided to publish this package under a new name: Craftemy! This is going to sound rather silly, but it was because of code namespacing. I like my name (it's the best one I've ever had), but for whatever reason, having "f" as the start of a word just doesn't appear aesthetically pleasing to me, especially when writing code ( namespace Chrisforrence\Package; just doesn't do it for me). My choices would either be:

• namespace Forrence\Package;
• namespace Craftemy\Package;

Between the two, I feel that both represent my overall vibe (whether because it literally represents me or it represents my ideals), but so that I can one day build something larger than myself, I went with the new naming!

If you're interested in utilizing the package in your own PHP application, the library's available in Packagist; just require it in Composer!

$ composer require craftemy/weatherstack

From there, take a look through the README.md file for how to use the package, or check out the package yourself in GitLab!