We wanted to get rid of the grief of searching through each and every streaming service, just to find out the show/movie you are looking for isn't there. With StreamFinder we aim to fix that problem.
StreamFinder scrapes search results from Google to report to you the sites you can use to stream your favorite tv shows and movies legally.
- First, we built our web-scraper in the back-end using Puppeteer, a big shoutout to Node.js.
- Second, we set up a basic layout for our webpage with Angular, utilizing The Movie Database API we were able to display information about the movies and shows being searched.
- Third, we set up our MongoDB Atlas database to save all of your favorite movies/shows along with the streaming services they are available on.
- Fourth and finally we created a custom API to retrieve movie and tv show data at the click of a mouse.
One challenge we came across was using Angular for our front-end, as it was the first time each of us used it for a project of this scale. There are a lot of moving parts when trying to create a search engine and sometimes those parts can get out of sync, another challenge we faced was locating problems as they occurred and figuring out the best course of action to address them. Our biggest challenge by far has been connecting our front and back-end together to ensure that data gets scraped and written to our database if not found upon an initial search by the user. Luckily we understood that certain ideas needed to be pivoted in order to pull everything together.
As first-time hackathoners, we're proud to be here! We put together a lot over the past 48 hours and for many of us, it was our first time using some of these dependencies. Web-scraping data, writing it to a database, and reading that data all in one click is easier said than done and we're proud to say we did just that.
We learned that team communication is necessary to keep everyone on the same page and also that receiving outside help can be one of the most valuable components of a good project.
There is only one direction, up! We will look to expand StreamFinder to query for music streaming services and reskin our website until it meets and exceeds all expectations.