Cloudbreak

Analytics Architecture

Pelican Point sits at the end of a dirt road on Western Australia's Indian Ocean coast — a legendary left-hand reef break where three-meter swells peel for 200 meters over shallow limestone. Kai Nakamura has surfed it since he was twelve and logged conditions from the cliff above his shop for thirty years: swell height, period, wind direction, tide, water temperature, all in pencil. Now the World Surf League wants to run a competition here. They have an eleven-day holding window and need to pick the best three days — get it wrong, and the world's best surfers paddle into mush on live television. Kai's notebooks hold the patterns, but patterns aren't predictions. His nephew Tane — a data engineer at a surf forecasting startup — has a plan: wire together buoy telemetry, satellite imagery, and decades of handwritten observations into something a model can learn from and a broadcast team can trust. You're spending the summer with Tane, turning pencil sketches into a production data platform — from a raw landing zone to real-time dashboards to wave-quality predictions, one architectural layer at a time.