after a long hiatus, its back :
"Hey folks! It's been since 6 years since our last blog post, WOW! I owe you all an update!
Personal life
Shortly after that last blog post, in mid-2019, I started a new job in San Francisco. I value their work-life balance a ton, and it has allowed me to slowly work more and more on followmy.tv.
About two years ago, I moved back to Southern California; My job allows me to work remotely, so I moved back to where I love living the most! And about a year ago, I finally was able to buy my own home!
A lot of life-changing events have happened, but followmy.tv remained constant throughout that time! I spend most of my weekends working on the site.
Migration to the cloud
I wanted followmy.tv to be much more stable with the ability to use modern new technologies like Kubernetes. In 2019, I finalized the transition of our entire website from a server in Germany to the Kubernetes platform of Google Cloud. This allowed me to develop very rapidly on the backend services of followmy.tv Deployments became automated and observability became much more straightforward.
This whole project took about 6 months to finish. It tripled our server costs but it was totally worth it for the gained flexibility!
A new data importer
At the very beginning, followmy.tv depended on TVRage. Around 2016, their API broke. As a result, much of our data started to become stale or just incorrect. We switched to a different provider, and our data has improved a lot since then. I never wanted to be dependent on a single API anymore.
The biggest project I've been working on behind the scenes is our new importer. It's built with Python running as a completely independent system that detects and imports all TV Show metadata and stores it in a graph database.
I'm about 80% done with the initial prototype and will soon be integrating this into followmy.tv. It contains a richer dataset of not just TV Shows but also the characters, storylines, and actors of these shows. It's not done yet, but it's close!
I also want to give out a massive shoutout to ForgotMyLines and Fish for being super fantastic content moderators! I can't thank you enough for all those hours of data reviews you've done. Thank you!!
A new internal GraphQL API
The second big project is the new internal GraphQL API that is replacing all the business logic currently written in PHP. As well as all the new features I want to implement in the future. It's written in Typescript and is running in the same Kubernetes cluster as our main application.
This has already been deployed to production and several pages of followmy.tv is already using this new API. Its not a user-visible feature but it allows me to develop new features much faster!
I'm constantly migrating more pages to this new API.
A new search engine
Our search was bad. It struggled with shows that have a very common short name like "Silo". Last month I completely rebuilt this search engine from the ground up. It uses ElasticSearch under the hood. I'm excited to announce that this is now fully available to all users!
My plans for 2024
My main priority is to finish the integration project of the new importer and move all of the existing features to the new API in the next 3 months. Once that is completed I will be shifting focus to revamp our UI. I want the theme of 2024 to be a year full of wonderful new features for you the user!
Some features and ideas I have:
Build an initial version of our iOS and Android apps
Allow users to create shareable lists like "Top TV shows with strong female lead characters"
Add actor information to our show pages
Ability to track rewatches, being able to track progress without losing all your history
An AI-powered recommendation engine
More intelligent notifications when new shows are airing
The community, you!
Followmy.tv is over 10 years old now! I'm eternally grateful for how wonderful this community has been. I checked our database and there are a handful of users who visited followmy.tv literally every day for the last 10 years. That blows my mind!
I promise to you that I will post at least one blog post per month to keep you up to date with the progress I'm making!"
