Alistair

Site Performance: Loading 30,000 Showings in a Browser At least twice a day, the pipeline scrapes 250+ London cinemas and produces a dataset of 1,500+ films...

Getting 30k cinema showings into a browser fast 🍿

Highlights:
• Deleted compress-json → saved 333 KB (it was fighting gzip)
• Content-hashed chunks + Cloudflare → warm cache transfers 20 KB, not 5.5 MB
• Lighthouse warm cache: 92/100 (Next battle: Improve cold cache 74/100)

dev.to/alistairjcbr...

Three Things I Learned Using LLMs in a Data Pipeline This is a submission for the Built with Google Gemini: Writing Challenge What I Built with...

Using Gemini in Clusterflick — not as a coding assistant, but to identify films from messy cinema listings.

What I learned:
1. A `reason` key made the model more honest
2. Gemini rewrites my prompts better than I do
3. Every response is untrusted input

dev.to/alistairjcbr...

Getting the Data Model Right: Movie -> Showings -> Performances When I started building cinema aggregation tooling — pulling listings from multiple independent...

I Started building Clusterflick with a flat Movie → Performances schema. This works fine until you look at how venues actually programme screenings.

Movie → Showings → Performances
Each layer earns its place when dealing with 250+ venues.

Full write-up 🎬 dev.to/alistairjcbr...

Scaling From 3 Cinemas to 240+ Venues: What Broke and What Evolved When I started scraping London cinema listings, I had three venues and a simple script. Fetch a page,...

Week 3 of the Clusterflick series 🍿

Scaling from 3 cinemas to 240+ venues: things break, patterns emerge (& I end up with 6 Raspberry Pis in my living room)

dev.to/alistairjcbr...

Also, the retrieve/transform split, why the BFI site is a nightmare, and the joy of common cinema platforms!

Calendar Feeds: Where It All Started When I lived in Belfast, I had one problem: I wanted to know what was showing at the Strand Cinema...

🦹 My not so grand villain origin story: wanting to know what was on at my local cinema without dealing with their clunky website

One ICS file in 2023 became 240 venues worth of cinema data - my first post in the series, where Clusterflick all started 🍿

dev.to/alistairjcbr...

I got tired of checking cinema websites to see what's on in London, so I built an aggregator that does it for me 🍿
Clusterflick currently covers 240 venues, logging over 1200 movies, and mainly runs on Github for infrastrucure (+ the 6 Raspberry Pis in my living room 😁)

Building Clusterflick: A London Cinema Aggregator I've been working on a personal project called Clusterflick — a single source for every movie showing...

I'm planning a series of posts about the interesting problems I'm encoutering in my side project, Clusterflick. Here's the intro post:
dev.to/alistairjcbr...