A long overdue update!
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!
Comments
Good luck with your personal stuff and also with this website! Yay! :)
You are the best. Keep it up
Thank you so much for this amazing site,
you rock
Good luck with everything
@PippoInzaghi I think this has something to do with time zones. A lot of shows are now released on streaming sites so I just put the release date at noon that day.
Back in the day. Pretty much all shows aired at a specific hour on networks.
@Lemon I like the sound of that. It seems like a fantastic feature. I love that you are continuing to improve the site. And even if you didn't it's already better than anything else I've tried. Especially for what I want from a TV tracker.
There's no rush on the movie aspect I was just curious if you'd thought about it for the future. Thanks for the reply, I appreciate it.
My shows are tracking 26 hours behind
Thank you! You're doing an amazing job and I've been an active user for the last 9 years and ever since then I was glad I've found this site. It's minimalistic, very clear and I've noticed a big improvement when it comes to new shows being added in most recent years. It's great, thank you for doing this for so many of us <3
To be completely honest, I've been using something different to track my TV for a long time now, but for some reason I can't seem to bring myself to delete this bookmark, even though I don't see myself coming back as an active user.
The reason I loved this site is because it's simple, not bloated with any unnecessary stuff. I don't plan on coming back, but I hope this won't change much. The minimalistic design is what made this site great and stand out.
The reason I left is because of the lack of maintenance, lot of my shows didn't show up, and sometimes it was a mess even when it did. Maybe it was fixed later, not sure, but that's what did it for me.
The reason I'm not coming back is because I found a solution that runs locally on my computer, functionally it's independent of everything. It does pull some data from the net, but like I said, it runs on my PC with local database and it works even offline. Taking the "fear of losing my data if a service or website goes down" out of the equation.
I'd love to see an offline windows version of followmy.tv but I guess that's too much to ask.
Anyways, good luck to y'all.
thx
Thanks for everything so far. I've been using this site since 2013 and think it's the best tracker for TV shows. I am looking forward to the improvements and future updates!
Good to read this update! Very happy that this site is still alive and kicking!
@Phoenix24 I'll prob add movies at some point. But I want to focus on tv shows right now and make that experience the best as possible.
For example, I want you to be able to follow the "Marvel Universe" so it auto alerts you when a new marvel show drops.
Thanks for all!
Thanks so much for this great site. It has just the right features that makes it (imo) the best TV tracker. I love the dashboard and the way it shows pinned TV shows in the order they released. It makes it the best place to track interconnected/crossover/same universe shows. No matter what kind of updates you do in the future I hope the functionality never goes away. You've got something special here.
In relation to same universe shows. Have you considered adding movie franchises? Not totally necessary but would be a nice bonus if it wasn't too much hassle.
Keep up the good work. Absolutely massively appreciate this site and all the work you've put into it.
Still here :)
merci for this site !!
Thanks for the nice job!
Good luck with all the modernization process.
PEACE V
Thanks for all that you do!
Keep up the good work! And if you need volunteer front-end devs, let me know :)
I checked and apparently I joined in 2012, so I've been "following my tv" for about a third of my life. (And yes, for a large part it has been daily, lol.) That's crazy!
Thank you for creating and continuing to work on this, your work and that of all contributors is very much appreciated.