What it is
A front-end for TMDB. The sidebar splits the catalogue two ways — by list (Popular, Top Rated, Upcoming) and by genre, with all nineteen TMDB genres carrying their own icon — and the main column pages through results as rated poster cards. Search runs across the full catalogue. Signing in hands off to TMDB's own auth, so the app talks to the account endpoints rather than keeping a user store of its own, and the whole interface switches between light and dark.
It is built with React and Redux Toolkit, styled with Material UI, and deployed on Netlify.
Where it came from
This started as a follow-along build from a course, and it would be dishonest to present it as an original architecture. What I did beyond the tutorial:
- Added features the course didn't cover.
- Restructured parts of the Redux Toolkit layer rather than keeping the shape it was taught in.
- Repaired what had gone stale — deprecated APIs and behavior that no longer worked against the current TMDB API.
- Owned the deployment end: Netlify build config, environment and API key handling, and routing.
The useful part wasn't the first pass. It was everything after it — taking a codebase somebody else structured, and having to understand it well enough to change its state layer and fix it against a moving third-party API.