Reelgood
Reelgood is a trendsetting app in the world of cataloguing the catalogues of streaming services. Reelgood looks at all the shows & movies in the world since film’s beginning, cross-references them to what’s offered across every streaming service, and then puts it onto a beautiful interface for the world to use for free. It is most of all beautiful, but it is really a programming work-of-art. The frontend is spectacularly done. My stint at this company was very useful to me. It was like a rookie in the army getting to train with the Navy SEALs.
My history at Reelgood
I joined in February or March of 2017 after I finished at Leanpub. I hung in there until February of 2018 wherein I was fired for not keeping up well enough. Regrettably I had found myself on the outs - I was taking on too much responsibility and not delivering enough, and they had seen enough.
The technology
I worked on the frontend. It was a React app which made use of cutting-edge features. The API calls, responses, and Redux state updates were managed with Observables, which are a fascinating paradigm for asynchronous events. We used Observables all over the codebase. The CSS was written with Sass, specifically SCSS. The advanced usage of Webpack back in 2017 was very instructive. There were server and client bundles built from separate parts of the codebase, with some shared code. The dev server, production server, hot reloading, and source maps were all set up manually. I am grateful for NextJS for handling these time-consuming duties for me.
