I learned to program shortly after receiving my first computer in the ninth grade.  In high school I taught myself Basic, Pascal, C, and HTML.  I also wrote a few little utilities, some hacker tools, and a program that converted text to Nadsat (aka, Clockwork Orange speak).  In the spring and summer of my senior year I built and launched a searchable index (like the original Yahoo) called PrimeScan.  This was 1997.  The code was raw and used flat files for data storage (I didn't know what SQL and relational databases were at the time), but it worked and was slowly getting traffic. However, it had a short life, and it was hacked during the first few weeks of college.  By that time I didn't have the time or dedication to revive it.

Although I received a degree in Computer Science, PrimeScan was the last real app that I personally launched and built--until now.  TrailerMatic.com is a simple web app that helps you pick a great movie, one random movie trailer at a time.  It was born out of my frustration one evening to find a movie to watch.  I spent over 45 minutes browsing Netflix recommendations, Amazon reviews, iTunes charts, box shots, descriptions, and ratings. I was overwhelmed by choice. I finally found a movie, but the process took too long and was more stressful than it had to be.

That experience led me to the idea of TrailerMatic.  I love trailers.  They are entertaining and often times better than the actual movie.  They are the studios best attempt to market a movie.  But trailers are mainly used to sell movies in the theaters.  Once a movie hits the DVD or online-streaming market, the trailer takes a back seat to reviews, ratings, box shots and descriptions.  TrailerMatic is designed to use trailers as a main tool for discovering (or re-discovering) movies.

TrailerMatic shows you one random movie trailer at a time with links to buy/rent/stream that movie from Amazon, iTunes, and Netflix.  It pulls from a list of 300+ movies (and growing) recommended by myself, my friends and "best of lists". Although it's random, it's unlikely you'll encounter a dud.  Since I rely on YouTube for trailer availability, the video quality is highly variable, but I've made an effort to maintain an acceptable quality baseline.

In addition to scratching an itch, TrailerMatic is also about keeping my coding skills fresh and current.  My day job remains design and product management, but I take pride in knowing that I can still build and launch simple apps.  Building TrailerMatic was a learning experience that I hope to continue with feature enhancements or launching other, simple apps.

In closing, thanks to everyone that gave me feedback and movie titles to add.  And a special thanks to Kevin Mateo Lim for all his help during our peer-programming sessions that got this project started.

Please check out TrailerMatic and let me know if you find it useful!