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Inception

I like watching movies and I have a Cineworld Unlimited card (watch as many movies as you want for about 2 ticket prices per month, it’s really worth it!). With this, the price of going to the cinema is the time and money spent on public transport. So batching screenings together helped me save.

I was hand-planning double-bills initially, but it got tedious and wanted to have some fun coding and learning, so I tried many alternatives.

Implementation

Initially I was trying to make a mobile app, then an AJAX-only page, but then soon realized I need a server to do the heavy lifting, so I also tried AppEngine. In the end I ended up with an Angular.js webapp with a Node.js backend with a Neo4J OGM database. Later, I migrated the backend to Kotlin/ktor.

For more history, see the project repository.

Usage

The way it works is that you select which cinemas you’re willing to go to. Then select which movies you’re interested in. Then it’ll give you a table of screenings and some plans to watch as many movies as possible in one batch.

Filter

Going to the cinema is limited by external factors, for example working day, so I built in some filters to help with that.

Optimizations

Cineworld plays a lot of advertisements, 15-25 minutes before each movie. I wasn’t really interested in watching the same ads over and over again, so I calculated a bit of delay to account for this. Still, with this, I’ve seen Kevin Bacon’s EE ads way too many times 😵.

Sharing

The URL changes as the inputs change, this means that it’s easy to share the current view with others.