Ski Guide

Overview

Ski Guide is a community platform where ski enthusiasts share and discover tours and slopes. It fills a gap between generic mapping apps and niche forums — giving the ski community a dedicated space for structured, searchable route information.

Problem

Finding good ski touring routes relies heavily on word of mouth and scattered forum posts. There was no dedicated platform that combined structured route data (difficulty, location, conditions) with community reviews and social discovery.

Process

The project was built with React and Next.js on the frontend, backed by Supabase for the database and authentication layer. Supabase handled user management and real-time data out of the box, which kept the architecture simple and the focus on product design.

Key design decisions were driven by the content type — ski tours have specific metadata that needed to be both easy to enter and easy to filter. The challenge was building a data entry experience that worked for users writing detailed posts, not just developers thinking about schemas.

Solution

The platform includes:

• User accounts: Registration, authentication, and personal profile
• Tour posts: Structured entries with images, route descriptions, difficulty level, location, and conditions
• Feed with search & filter: Find tours by criteria — not just chronological scrolling
• Detail view: Full route information, images, and community data in a single view
• "For You" page: Top-rated posts surfaced for discovery

Outcome

Ski Guide demonstrated the value of choosing the right backend-as-a-service for a project's scope. Supabase's combination of PostgreSQL, auth, and storage meant the focus stayed on the product rather than infrastructure. The social discovery mechanics — filtering, rating, personalized feed — required careful information architecture work to feel useful rather than noisy.