Growing up in the Caribbean, you develop a relationship with weather that most people don't have. Not in a dramatic, storm-chaser way. More in a quiet, constant way. You feel the shift in the trade winds before you check anything. You know what rain smells like twenty minutes before it arrives. Someone's grandmother already told you what's coming.

That's part of why I never paid much attention to weather apps. I'd just glance at them the same way you glance at a clock you already know is wrong. The number says 82°F. Fine. But 82 in Antigua doesn't feel like 82 in New York, and it definitely doesn't feel like 82 in London. The humidity here sits and hits differently. The wind off the Atlantic carries something that a "Real Feel" number on AccuWeather doesn't always quite translate.

Sometime last year I started building a weather site. For which I've written about the origins before: how it started with my father, with the calls that used to come in during hurricane season, asking whether this storm was going to hit, how strong, and when. After he died, those calls came to me. That part of the story hasn't changed.

What has changed is what I started to notice once I got deeper into the data.

When you build a weather platform from scratch, you have to make choices about how to present information. What words to use. What thresholds matter. What "windy" means. What "heavy rain" means. These seem like small decisions until you realize that every major weather service has already made those decisions for you, and almost none of them had your region in mind when they did.

Take wind descriptions. On most global platforms, 15 mph wind speeds are often described as "moderate." In our EC islands, that's a normal Tuesday afternoon!

The trades blow like that most of the year. If a weather site is telling someone in Dominica that the wind is moderate every single day, the word loses all meaning. It stops being information you can feel and just becomes noise.

Or take "feels like" temperatures. The algorithms behind those numbers were largely developed for temperate climates. They account for wind chill very well, because that matters in New York in January.

But the way humidity and solar radiation interact in a tropical maritime climate, where you're at sea level, surrounded by warm water, with persistent moisture in the air. Well, it doesn't really map as cleanly onto models built for continental weather.

I'm not saying the data is wrong. The sensors are fine. But the interpretation, the layer between raw data and what a person actually experiences when they step outside, that layer is where things get lost.

Researchers have reached the same conclusion from the data side. A 2022 study in the International Journal of Climatology looked at 40 years of heat stress data across the Caribbean and found that standard indices don't capture how conditions are actually experienced here. The interaction between humidity, radiation, and wind speed matters more than temperature alone, and the Lesser Antilles showed the steepest increase in heat stress trends. The science confirms what any one of us standing outside already knew: the number on the screen doesn't match what we feel!

This is what I've been focused on with Dewedda.com.

Not adding more data. The opposite, really. Making the existing information land the way it should for someone standing on one of our islands.

Wind descriptions that reflect what trade winds actually feel like here, not in San Francisco. Condition summaries are written the way we'd describe weather to each other. "Boy, today breezy eh?!" Yeah, like that, not the way a meteorological text would phrase it.

Thresholds adjusted so that "heavy rain" actually means heavy rain for our tropical islands.

Some of this is technical. Adjusting the breakpoints in the code where one description transitions to another. Rewriting the logic that decides when conditions are "comfortable" versus "oppressive." Pulling in sea-level pressure and dew point alongside temperature so the "feels like" calculation accounts for what it's actually like to be here, at this latitude, at this humidity, with this kind of wind.

But most of it is not technical at all. Most of it is just paying attention. Reading what the site says, then stepping outside and asking, does this match what I'm feeling right now? And if it doesn't, figuring out why.

Choosing the right data source was part of getting this right. I tested several weather APIs and settled on AccuWeather for the hourly data.

After comparing readings against what I was actually feeling outside, their data consistently matched conditions here better than the alternatives. When every description, threshold, and summary on the site depends on that foundation, accuracy is the thing you don't compromise on.

The big weather platforms will never do this for the Caribbean or specifically the Eastern Caribbean islands. It's not that they can't. It's that there's no reason for them to. We are a few million people spread across many small islands. Not exactly a priority market.

And that's fine. That's not a complaint. It's just the long-standing reality that pushed me to build something different.

What surprised me is how much there is to get right. I assumed the hard part would be hurricane tracking, storm proximity calculations, satellite imagery, the technically complex stuff. And last year, developing that part was hard. But the thing that keeps pulling me back in, the thing I keep refining, is the simple stuff. The temps, wind, rain and the words and descriptions.

Because for us, weather isn't dramatic most of the time. It's not always hurricanes and tropical storms. It's knowing whether to hang laundry outside. It's knowing whether the sea will be rough for the ferry. It's knowing whether that cloud buildup to the east is going to drift over or push past.

Getting that right turns out to be harder, and more satisfying, than I expected!

Last month, I was in Antigua for practical reasons. Family. A few errands. Most visits are like that. You arrive, you move quickly, you leave again without really seeing anything.

This time, I had a couple of days with no schedule. So I drove around.

Not with a destination in mind. Just moving through places that once structured my childhood. Roads I knew before I knew their names. Villages that still felt familiar even though the houses and buildings had changed.

I drove past beaches I grew up around. And without trying to, I remembered.

Sandcastles collapsing under careless feet. Full cricket games played on open stretches of sand, a dozen of us kids running without worrying about time. Smoke from barbecues drifting across the beach. Steamed fish. Laughter carrying to and from groups along the beach.

I remembered staying until the sun was gone, temporary lights strung up as if night was optional. Watching my uncles and their friends pull fishing nets from the water, heavy with movement. Enjoying another round of food. Finally, falling asleep on the drive home, salt still on my skin, sand still in my pants, waking briefly just enough to feel the car stop.

These were not special days. They were ordinary.

They were ordinary because nothing about them needed defending. The ocean did not feel fragile. The land did not feel temporary. You did not need to plan around nature. You lived inside it and assumed it would hold its shape.

Driving now, years later, I realized how much of my sense of normal was built on that assumption.

This year, I did not stop at the beaches. I did not walk the sand. I just kept driving, letting memory run alongside what I could see through the windshield. The contrast did not announce itself. It arrived quietly. A shoreline narrowing here. A seaweed smell there. Equipment parked where there used to be nothing but the breeze and shade.

Some beaches now need weekly attention. Seaweed comes in heavy and persistent, not as an occasional visitor but as a condition. It gets removed, hauled away, managed. With it comes a smell that lingers longer than it should, and the understanding that this is no longer an exception. It is routine.

Whole systems have grown around that routine. Workers. Schedules. Budgets. Decisions that once did not exist because there was nothing to respond to. Nature has not become ugly. It has become demanding.

I kept thinking about how close we lived to the water when I was young. Two minutes walk. Four if you were slow. The ocean was not a destination. It was background. It framed our days without inserting itself into them.

That framing has shifted.

There are places where the water now reaches walls that once felt like a distant safety line from the ocean. Walls that used to mark the end of play and the beginning of caution. Like the stone walls that marked the boundary for our beach cricket at Half Moon Bay, Antigua, in the late 1980s. As children, we never questioned why they were set so far back.

In more recent decades, it’s become clear they were built for a different ocean. A smaller one.

This is not a dramatic realization. There is no single moment where it all clicks into place. It is more like noticing that a familiar room has been rearranged slowly over time, while you were away.

Living now in St. Kitts has sharpened that awareness. The heat feels heavier. The seasons feel less polite. Hurricanes no longer feel like rare tests of luck but recurring questions that must be answered again and again. Preparation has become a permanent posture.

That is part of what led me to build dewedda.com. It was not born from fear or activism. It started as attention. Watching patterns. Tracking storms. Trying to understand extremes that were becoming less extreme and more normal. What began as a hobby quietly turned into a habit of looking closer.

When you grow up with something stable, you notice when it stops behaving the way it used to.

I do not romanticize the past. The islands were never gentle. In many ways time had been more kind to our quality of life. Nature has always carried consequences. But there was more of a consistency to it. A set of expectations you could learn.

What feels different now is how unpredictable nature has become. In the sense that the background of daily life no longer feels fixed in the way it once did.

Antigua is still beautiful. St. Kitts is still beautiful. The Caribbean is still beautiful. The water still catches the light the same way it always has. It feels different when you arrive carrying memory with you than when you arrive with fresh eyes.

I know what these places look like when they were unbothered. I carry that reference with me whether I want to or not. It makes every change legible in a way it might not be to someone seeing it for the first time.

This is not grief. It is recognition.

I didn’t know way back then, that those moments were special because they felt permanent.

Now, knowing they are not, perhaps the work is simply to notice them, and to help the next generation recognize their ordinary days as special. So that one day, as they travel these same island roads, their memories will be as fond as mine.

The island world we grew up inside has shifted under forces far larger than us, and in their wake, we, the people of the Caribbean, have adapted. Quietly. Professionally. One system at a time.

I started gaming really young. Some of my earliest memories are standing next to a neighbor’s CRT monitor playing on what I am pretty sure was a Commodore 64. Also Pong on an Atari. Tetris. Also Tetris on a Game Boy. The original Super Mario Bros.

Not long after, games like Goal, Double Dribble, Bionic Commando, Kung Fu, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, and too many to recount all became part of my childhood gaming foundation.

Gaming was never a phase for me. From the single-digit age, through my teens, into adulthood, and now into my late forties, it has always been there in one form or another. Different consoles, different PCs, different genres, but always present. It was something I shared with cousins, friends, and later with complete strangers online. It was an escape, sure, but more than that, it was a place where curiosity, patience, problem-solving, and imagination mattered.

There was a stretch, though, where that spark faded. If I had to point to the longest gap where gaming felt hollow, it would have been a year or two after Battlefield 4. Whatever came next in that franchise just did not land for me. Battlefield 1, Battlefield V, Battlefield 2042, honestly the fact that I have to think about which one came when kind of says it all. Call of Duty games were still there, but felt like the same loop over and over. Run, shoot, die, respawn. Fast reflexes, constant motion, hours burned, but very little thought required. No planning. No strategy beyond muscle memory. No reason to slow down and think.

At the time, I did not even realize what I was missing. I had forgotten how much I valued games that asked something more of me. Games that make you value each LIFE. Games like Zelda. Games like Metal Gear Solid. I played most of the Metal Gear series over the years. Stealth, gadgets, choice, consequence. Around 2018, Ghost Recon Wildlands pulled me in. Finally, something with some depth to it. You could plan, scout, sneak, coordinate, or go loud if you chose. The world mattered. Your decisions mattered.

Games like Ghost Recon Wildlands reminded me why gaming was special in the first place. They let you step out of the repetitive cycle of school, work, and responsibility and drop into a world that felt alive and unpredictable. Especially when you factor in other players. Random people from different countries, different ages, different walks of life, all intersecting in the same digital space. That sense of shared experience is powerful, and it sticks with you! Deep in a space of memory that only comes alive again when you are having that level of enjoyment again.

Fast forward to 2025. I saw the trailer for Battlefield 6 and I remember telling my wife how disappointed I had been with gaming as a whole, how I had barely gamed for years because nothing felt worth my time, nothing stimulated my brain like years past. I got to the point where I thought, maybe the kid in me is dying. Am I just getting old?

Then I watched that trailer and thought, this looks like Battlefield 2 and 3 again. This looks like what I loved. My first reaction was that I might need to buy a PlayStation 5.

I am glad I did not. I already have a good-enough gaming PC, so instead I bought a PlayStation 5 controller (was using my PS4 controller which suffers stick drift since it was the same controller I kept from BF4). Maxed out the graphics settings on BF6, and surprisingly smooth performance. That was it. I was back in! I was excited, but was this really it? Was this what I longed for and what could keep me engaged?

According to Steam, I put over 100 hours into Battlefield 6. My last session was November 16. I enjoyed it. I really did. But here is the important part. I have not touched Battlefield 6 since I started playing Arc Raiders.

I did not discover Arc Raiders right away. It was not something I was anticipating or following closely, and I like BF6.

With Arc Raiders, the visuals got my attention first. But also something about it felt familiar in a way, nostalgic. A bit of Bionic Commando meets The Legend of Zelda. Hints of Lost Planet. Shades of Metal Gear Solid and Ghost Recon Wildlands. Old ideas, but also something that feels new!

I had no idea how much this game was about to take over my mind.

For the first time in a very long time, I found myself doing something I had not done in years. I started taking notes before playing. Writing down ideas, and what areas I wanted to explore, how I wanted to approach the map, what my goals were for each raid on the surface. Even thinking about what I might say to other players to reduce the chances of getting killed. lol That alone says a lot about what kind of game this is.

I checked Steam while writing this and I am already at 50 hours into Arc Raiders, sitting around level 31. When did that happen? Those hours feel different that BF6, less of a grind and more of a journey, an experience, a story.

I have had sessions where I spent more time in menus than on the surface. Learning recycling systems. Understanding what materials come from what. Figuring out inventory management, loadouts, and stash storage efficiency. Digging into blueprints, skill points, and systems I did not fully grasp at first. Thinking about how best to allocate resources. Planning instead of reacting.

I love THAT. Yes, THAT is what was missing from gaming! You know THAT which you cannot just explain in a sentence but is a feeling of epic depth that creates wonder and wakes up the kid inside of us gamers.

Don't get me wrong, if Arc Raiders didn't exist I would probably have continued to play BF6, albeit with less of THAT feeling. Because you simply load in, find a match, move fast, react faster. Hardly anyone uses a mic. Maybe five percent of players, if that. Those who do, it's not for anything useful like "Squad" - a good example of a great game reinvented into the ground.

Arc Raiders slows you down. It makes you think. It makes every decision feel heavier because there is something at stake.

That is why, at 10:56 p.m., I feel motivated enough to write this directly to you the developers of Arc Raiders, Game of the Year 2025.

Here is my advice.

Do not change this game.

Fix bugs. Patch issues. Improve stability. Do the necessary technical work that comes with modern development. But do not redesign or reinvent it. Do not chase gamer feedback; ignore all the YouTubers. Do not sand down the edges to make everything faster, easier, or more efficient.

I even caught myself falling into that trap. I had a moment where I thought about how cool it might be to have a in-game marketplace where players could trade items. It came from real interaction. Meeting random players whose backpacks were full, handing over useful gear, helping each other out. And for a second I thought, this could be streamlined. My idea is garbage! Garbage, ignore it, ignore all the ideas coming in.

Modern gaming has trained us to believe that everything can and should be optimized, accelerated, and patched into perfection. As soon as something great appears, the instinct is to say, "Here is how you can make it better!" That instinct is dangerous. It's killed a lot of games recently.

Sometimes better is worse. And less, is more. Just sit back, relax. You did good!

This game works because of its friction. Because of its limits. Because not everything is convenient. The tension, the planning, the uncertainty, the human interactions that are not mediated or interrupted. Those are not flaws. You got them all right the first time.

I think of it like a long marriage. I have been married for 18 years. Any couple could point out things they wish were a little different. A little less of this, a little more of that. But life does not work that way. When you change one thing, just one, you change everything connected to it. You may have the best intentions. You may be responding to feedback. You may even be giving people what they think they want. And in doing so, you will destroy something rare. Don't do it.

Arc Raiders feels like a gem. A reminder of what games used to be and what they can still be. It respects the player’s intelligence. It respects their time in a deeper way than just filling it. It gives meaning to thought, patience, morality, and restraint.

So my advice again is simple:

Leave it alone!

Thank you,

Hayden James

This web page, along with several other projects (VPNs, virtualization, remote infrastructure monitoring, etc.) are hosted from my home lab, pictured above.

Read full details about all hardware and accessories listed here. (and recent photos)

Hardware list

(Note: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.)

- StarTech 12U Wall Mount Rack.
- Acer LCD monitor custom-mounted to a 1u top mounted blank.
- TP-Link SG2210XMP-M2 switch.
- 16 port cat6 patch panel.
- pfSense firewall appliance.
- Peplink Balance 20x - kept for Wi-Fi and emergency 4G LTE internet.
- AC Infinity 1U Universal Rack Shelf.
- 1u blank.
- Thinkcentre M73p and Thinkcentre M715q.
- AC Infinity 1U Universal Rack Shelf.
- AC Infinity cloudplate intake fans.
- x2 1u mesh vents.
- CyberPower UPS.
- AC power strip - Covered by 1U security Plexiglas.
- Not pictured are 2 Unifi APs and 2 Unifi AP Beacons.

Thanks for stopping by!