PickleWatch

PickleWatch, an App for Pickleball Athletes

So basically the problem is there's like 8 pickleball courts around Tampa and you never know which ones are actually free or if they're packed until you drive there and it's a whole thing. So I made an app that tells you before you leave your house.

It's a website (kinda like an app, you can add it to your home screen) that shows all 8 courts and how busy each one probably is right now. It's not just guessing randomly either — I made it learn the normal pattern for each court (like Northlakes gets crazy busy around 6pm on weekdays but High 5 is more of a lunchtime thing) and then it mixes that with actual people checking in. Like if you show up and tap "I'm here" and say how busy it is, that updates everyone's app in real time for like 90 minutes and then it fades away.

The real time part is honestly the coolest part, I used this thing called Supabase which is like a free database that can push updates instantly. I tested it by opening two browser windows side by side and checking in on one and watching it show up on the other one immediately, no refreshing or anything.

Other stuff it does:

Rally button — pick a time and it makes a message you can send to your group chat on WhatsApp asking who wants to play
Polls — like if people can't decide where to play you make a poll and everyone votes and you can see it update live
Friends — add your friends and it'll show you when they check in somewhere, plus little avatar bubbles showing who's at a court right now
No login or password or anything, you just type your name once and that's it. Didn't want to deal with accounts for something this small.

Everything's free too — Supabase has a free plan and I'm hosting it on Vercel which is also free, so it's not costing me anything to run.