MovieMates

This is the story of MovieMates, a service I built with my roommates to help us determine what movies to watch.

I share an apartment with 3 other people and we love watching movies. Living in a cold city like Chicago, it's one of our favorite hobbies during the long winters.

About 2 years ago, we noticed that many times it would take us very long to decide which movie to watch. We also realized that many times we would talk about movies we wanted to watch but couldn't remember them whenever it mattered. Sometimes when there were 2 people home to watch a movie, we couldn't watch it because another roommate wanted too and we didn't want to watch it without them!

Some of us at home are engineers and quickly thought of ways to fix these problems. The first thing we thought of was having a Google Sheet shared among us and adding rows with the movies each wanted to watch. Each of us would then have one column with a dropdown for each row with three options to pick what we thought of that movie: if you wanted to watch it, if you didn't care much, or if you didn't want to watch it. With that information, we could apply filters for the columns to figure out what movies we could watch depending on who was available to watch it at that time. We called it MovieMates, here's what it looked like:

Here's what it would look like if only Ainho and I wanted to watch a movie without Fido nor Alex:

This was a cheap way of satisfying most of our needs. It worked fine other than being a bit annoying having to reset the filters constantly.

Soon, we started adding a lot of movies, the idea was a success! However, we often had the problem of not knowing much about a movie. Sometimes the title was even hard to find online. We agreed on making a new column for each movie where we could manually add the link to Rotten Tomatoes to know more about it. That way we could use the magical IMPORTXML function in Google Sheet to parse the ratings from that URL. However, we started having issues and some ratings started to not load properly:

We knew we wanted more out of that spreadsheet and some of us were looking for an idea to work on a toy project. We decided to start a Rails app to solve this problem once for all. MovieMates as we know it today was born.

After some time developing MovieMates, it became ready to replace the spreadsheet. I had it deployed on a Raspberry Pi locally and it did its job for a long time as we kept improving the site very slowly.

Time passed, we replaced the spreadsheet with the app and we improved it over time to fit our needs. We told other friends about it and turned out would enjoy using it as well, so a few months ago we started working to get it ready for the public. This meant enabling the site to work with different groups of friends as well as making it prettier (when it was only for us, we cared more about the function than the form).

Today I announced the project for anybody to use. It's not the greatest piece of software in the world, but it's helped us with our problem. I hope it helps you as well.

The site features group management for friends, searching movies on The Movie Database and importing its data, links to search on popular streaming sites like Netflix, and provides an easy way of finding out what movies are best to watch with your friends. We've come a long way from that spreadsheet:

Try it out yourself on moviemates.party and please let me know what you think. I have plenty of energy and ideas to improve it if it becomes a helpful tool for more people.

Thanks for reading and enjoy MovieMates!