What to watch?
A few weeks ago I spend some days in Zurich, Switzerland with my best friend. In preparation of this happening we decided to have some Skype calls and tried to figure out which movies we should watch once I would be there.
A very long time ago we already discussed the idea of having a platform to decide which movies to watch – especially with larger crowds and friends with picky interests in movie genres, so we could get to a consensus across all guests. And now – it happened:
The host of a new event needs to create an account (even though not really required) and can enter a name, if other movie suggestions are allowed or just those the host allowed. You as a guest can then either add new movies or in any case vote for those movies that are already added to the event.
Technically, this has been a pretty interesting project for me since I haven’t worked with Firebase for a while now. The last time I did Firebase didn’t belong to Google then. Firebase is a Document Store as a Service and free for the first 100 Megabytes of storage.
On the Frontend side I used Vue – which I gained some proficiency over the past few months.
Very soon it came to the point where I had to marry Vue and Firebase and since I couldn’t find any Vue plugins to take care of the tasks I looked for some other references. Luckily I found Michal Bujalski’s post: https://medium.com/@MichalBujalski/reactive-firebase-auth-with-vue-92577ab78ff6
Lastly – when coming to the movies – I didn’t want to provide all the movie details on my own and users shouldn’t enter a description for the movies they wanted to watch. Therefore I wired up The Movie Database to grab all the movie details including covers.
And who would I be if I wouldn’t allow users to find the host’s place and parking lots or information about public transport? When creating a new event you can even add this.
All in all – two days full of concentration and that’s the outcome – far from perfect and a lot of Spaghetti code, but that’s my style and leaves some space for improvement and refactoring further down the road.
Don’t worry, be crappy.
Guy Kawasaki