About

The app &
the person behind it

Built for cricketers,
by a cricketer

Bat or Brolly started with a familiar Saturday morning ritual — checking three different weather apps, getting three different answers, and still not knowing whether to bother making the trip to the ground.

The app pulls live forecast data from Open-Meteo and runs it against cricket-specific thresholds — temperature, wind speed, and precipitation probability — to give a single, plain-English verdict. It checks the 14:00 GMT forecast, which corresponds to typical start times for 40-over and 50-over recreational matches across the UK.

It won't tell you whether to officially call off a game. That's for your captain, your umpires, and your ground staff. But it'll give you a decent read of whether it's worth packing the kit bag.

Matt Warne

I've played cricket for as long as I can remember — mostly in Somerset, mostly in the rain. When I'm not on the pitch I spend time in the workshop refurbishing cricket bats, which turns out to be a surprisingly meditative way to spend an evening.

Professionally, I work in IT and am building towards a career in cloud infrastructure and solutions architecture. Bat or Brolly is a project I built to sharpen my skills across the full stack — Flask, AWS, Terraform, Docker, and CI/CD — while solving a problem I actually had.

It's a gimmick app with a serious infrastructure story behind it.