Movie App

The problem

A movie discovery app that goes past a single search box: browse what’s trending, upcoming, or top-rated, search by title, and — the part most clones skip — follow a cast member from a movie’s detail page into their own biography and filmography.

Stack, precisely

React Native for the client, Tailwind CSS for styling, Axios against a movie metadata API for trending/upcoming/top-rated lists, search, and cast data.

Architecture and the decisions behind it

The navigation model is the real design decision: a movie’s detail screen links to its cast, and each cast member’s screen links back into their own filmography — the same detail screen component, rehydrated with a different person’s data. Treating “movie” and “person” as two instances of the same drill-down pattern, rather than two unrelated screens, is what keeps the cast-to-filmography browsing from turning into duplicated screen code.

What was hard, and what was learned

Keeping the detail screen generic enough to serve both a movie and a cast member without becoming a conditional-heavy mess required deciding early what the two views actually share versus where they diverge, instead of forking the component the first time a difference showed up.

Status

Complete.