Where Have You Been? (thanks Manchester Orchestra)

I’ve had a particularly prolonged busy period of work of… a year or so? Maybe longer? At this point, honestly who can even understand the passage of time any more. Anyway, that seems to have come to and end for now so I’m trying to reclaim my evenings and start actually finishing work on time.

As part of that (and with a bit more mental bandwidth to spare after I log off), I’m trying to pick up some new projects and get back into the routine of doing some programming for fun rather than just for work.

I assume you have something planned then?

Well, yes. The title of this post is maybe a giveaway, even if it’s rather vague.

I first moved to Edinburgh almost a decade ago now (terrifying) and moved into a flatshare with the people who I would come to regard as my Edinburgh mum and dad - Jamie and Louise (alongside a semi-regularly changing 4th flat member). This was just before streaming properly took off in a major way, and when the two of them wanted to watch a film they would play a particular game - one of them would pick a stack of DVDs (!) out of the cupboard, and offer two of them up to the other. The other person would pick one film and basically it’d be a winner-stays-on competition, but you’d only ever have to decide between two films at a time. That meant it usually went super-fast and you’d get to a final choice way quicker than having to pick from just a stack of films.

That stopped being a thing we could do as watching physical films stopped being a thing, that stopped being something that we could do. I’ve always had the idea in the back of my head of making some kind of digital equivalent, so I think that’s what I’m going to try and do.

The actual plan

I don’t have a very specific plan yet here - part of the fun is going to be experimenting along the way - but I do have a rough outline:

1. A very basic command-line version. Just to firm up the logic and have a nice starting point (this shouldn’t take long)
2. Adding in a way to actually search for films. Maybe through IMDb?
3. Converting to a web-based version - maybe with fastapi or dash
4. Making it pretty (it’ll probably look bad before here)
5. Profit???

I’ll probably actually need to come up with a name for it at some point too. For tonight, though, I think just getting these ideas out of my head will suffice.