Rotub* 

So many people are building wonderful things using their incredible talent
that it can be discouraging to even think about trying an idea of our own.

I have craved to have a side project where I would be in full control of decisions, ideas and outcomes; building things for others gets you a certain degree of satisfaction but building something for yourself is satisfying on a whole other level.

My problem

In recent years I have become obessesed with viewing side projects. There are some really talented people on the internet building really good and clever things. I became quite envious of such people and started to get worked up about not having any ideas of my own.

I got over admiring other people and their work,
I wanted to admire myself and my work as well.

I spent hours per week browsing and using other peoples work wishing I could do something similar for my own personal experience and enjoyment, but I couldn't think of an idea.

My idea

Then, one day I found myself browsing upcoming movies on Apple Trailers.

Suddenly I realised I desired a clean & simple website that shows me what movies are now showing in Australian theaters. I couldn't find one.

And with that my side project idea was born.

Learning curve

Being a bit of a perfectionist I like coding everything myself but i wanted to use this project to get past that hurdle. I took this time as a perfect opportunity to trial run Bootstrap and pulled together some other open source projects. Basically my side project was turning into the sum of other peoples work.

This was a good thing because it gave me more time to think about what I was building and not only how I was building it.

Building

I didn't want to manually add, edit or remove movie titles so I decided to use Rotten Tomatoes API for capturing movie data, because it looked the simplest to implement.

2 days later I had designed, coded and released a proof of concept website. It wasn't the most amazing piece of work but it was symbolizing my following through from an idea to a working product.

It didn't matter that it wasn't getting much attention. I was finding it useful. Every few days I would open it to see what movies were listed, watch the trailers and read some related tweets.

It's not perfect, but I can once again admire other people and their work because when I look at and use Moviies, I can admire my own.

One year after launching Moviies, today it has an all new look and feel. I've started from scratch and brought a great designer (Jo) on board, because nothing great gets done alone.

Nothing great gets done alone.