plate iv — viewing behavior
Recon
A movie tracker whose taste engine fades out the questionnaire as it learns who you are.
- signal
- viewing behaviortmdb + quiz decay
- instrument
- next.jssite + chrome extension
- role
- solo, product + extension
- stack
- next.js 16 · react 19 · supabase · tmdb
- year
- 2025
after 24 films: quiz 30% · history 70%
pull the film · it stops at the floor
i. problem
Every movie app asks ten questions on day one and never learns again. But quiz answers are a guess about yourself; watch history is the truth. The quiz should be scaffolding that the building eventually replaces.
ii. signal
Viewing behavior, weighted by an adaptive decay: quizWeight = max(0.30, 1 − completed/(completed + 10)). At zero movies the quiz is 100% of the signal; by twenty it's down to a third. A Chrome extension supplies the truth: it detects what's actually playing on Netflix, Prime, or any site with a video element, cleans the title out of DOM noise, matches it against TMDB, and syncs it over token auth (SHA-256 hashed, bearer headers).
iii. build
A complete product — watchlist, completed tracking, per-movie recommendations, viewing insights, inline preference recalibration — wearing a fully custom retro-terminal design system: a procedural Three.js robot mascot, CRT route transitions, tilt-on-hover cards, a genre radar chart, and a “Signal Lost” 404. Deployed on Vercel, in daily use.
iv. proof
Live at recon-six-bay.vercel.app. The recommendation math is applied consistently across every surface, the extension works on arbitrary streaming sites, and the design system was built from scratch — the reason this portfolio's animations have a track record behind them.