Project: React Movie Review Site (Complete)

8/6/2020 – I was able to pick this  back up again after finishing the Sharepoint course.  The main addition since the previous version is the addition of typeahead so that users can search an online movie database.  The user then picks the movie they want and the information is saved back to the page (including the movie poster) and ultimately into Firebase when the users saves the review.  I may revisit this to take care of a couple of small items but for now I am moving on to the next project.

So now that I’ve finished the most extensive React course that I could find (here) it’s time to actually put it all to use to show what I can do.  To be honest I was starting to get anxious towards the latter half of the course because I was itching to get out there to start making my own app.  I am glad that I did not let a little anxiety get the best of me as the last section of the course was an update to the main course that had us working with newer concepts like effects, hooks, etc.

One of the things that I find really fascinating about my journey is that I have gotten a chance to architect my career.  One of my strengths in life is being able to get a task and then deconstruct it into small pieces.   Within 30 minutes of being furloughed I had already figured out what I needed to do over the course of the next 4 weeks.  That gave me time to take an agile approach to the bigger task (reinventing me).

Anyway, on to the new project.   In my previous angular project (here) I build a front-end to a trakt.tv site.  I thought about doing something similar here but then I had a different idea.  What if I just made a min-version of their site?  A user could come in, search for a movie and then leave a review and rating.   Rather than writing the values back to their api I would just write them to my own database.  I currently have my own personal movie review site (here) but that app uses php and is only available to me.

Application URL:   http://movie-reviews-adam.herokuapp.com

Git:  https://github.com/adamcodes716/movie-reviews – see readme for setup instructions.

Minified writeup : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mz1dTSLlgrKobQEvY4E5raYqlUXHpmXOVCzo78mYmvk/edit?usp=sharing

Main Project Features

These are the minimum features that I want the site to have.

1. Only authenticated users can use the app  COMPLETE
2. Users can search on movies – the app will pass search to an online movie db and return the results. COMPLETE
3. Include movie posters in the application  COMPLETE
4. Users will be allowed to enter their review and rating for each movie  COMPLETE  
5. Reviews stored to firebase   COMPLETE
6. Users will be able to look at their reviews as well as the community reviews  Not Complete
7. Project will be in github with API information stored in files not available in the project   COMPLETE
8. Testing will be completely automated via jest  Not Complete
9. Production build (including push) will be completely automated    COMPLETE

Other Possibilities

Once I get the main project done I’d like to explore the following

1. Add a configuration for different backends
2. Include movie posters from 3rd party sources