🎮 MovieNest Gets a Mood Ring: Recommending Films with Weather, Time & Tears

So I was staring out my window one rainy night, thinking:

“Wouldn’t it be cool if my app felt the vibe and showed me a romantic thriller?”

And that’s how I spiraled into turning my chill movie app into a mood-sensing, AI-powered, vibe-aware recommender system.

Spoiler: The mood logic was easier than the geolocation permission denial logic.

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🔧 Goal: Make MovieNest Feel Emotions (Kind Of)

This update was all about personalization. I wanted the app to:

• Detect the current weather and time
• Guess your mood from that combo (like a fortune teller... but with JavaScript)
• Recommend movies that match that vibe

Also:

• Handle permission denial gracefully (not by throwing an error and dying 😵)
• Keep everything snappy with virtual scroll + debounce

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🧠 The (Questionable) AI Logic

Step 1: Mood Detection

I hooked into OpenWeather’s API + good ol’ Date() and assigned moods like:

• Rainy Night → Romantic Thriller 🌧️🌙
• Sunny Morning → Feel-Good Comedy ☕☀️
• Foggy Afternoon → Mystery Drama 🕵️‍♀️

Basically, my app is now a softboi who asks,

*"Are you okay? Here's a comfort film."

Step 2: Mood → Genre

I made a neat moodGenreMapping object:

{
  feelgood: [35, 10751], // Comedy, Family
  cozy: [10749, 18], // Romance, Drama
  adventure: [12, 28], // Adventure, Action
  mystery: [9648, 53], // Mystery, Thriller
}

So each mood maps to TMDB genres — and my app fetches them dynamically.

Step 3: Smart Fetching Flow

If you allow location:
→ Weather + Time → Mood → Genre → Movies

If you deny location (you rebel):
→ Time-only Mood → Genre → Movies

If you search manually:
→ I shut up and show you what you want.

And just to be polite, I added a 🧠 Mood Explanation Banner —

“It’s raining in your area at night, so here’s a romantic thriller.”
Because transparency matters. Even in movie logic.

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😮‍😴 Challenges, AKA “Why Am I Like This?”

❌ Weather API 401

I foolishly used OpenWeather's fancy 3.0 OneCall endpoint.
Turns out, that one costs real money 😭
So I switched to a free and functional endpoint. Budget dev life.

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📍 No Location? No Problem.

I realized users could deny geolocation (how dare they), and I wasn’t handling it.
Now I fallback like a champion:\
→ Just use the time and pretend we know the weather 🕰️✨

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♻ Infinite Fetch Bug

Forgot to reset the pagination page when a new mood or search triggered.
The app said, “More movies! More!”
I said, “Please stop.”
It now stops.

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🤖 Mood Mapping Misfire

I passed the time directly into moodGenreMapping like a rookie.
What I needed was:
getMoodFromContext(weather, time) → mood → genres

Fixed it.
Cried a bit.

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📱 Mobile Geolocation Weirdness

Some mobile devices didn’t even ask for permission.
Added logs and tested denial flow manually. (Felt like QA. Still unemployed.)

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🚀 The Final Vibe

Now MovieNest can do this:

• It’s raining in Mumbai at night?
  → You get romantic thrillers. 💖🕵️‍♂️

• It’s sunny in Paris?
  → Boom, comedies and feel-goods. ☀️😂

• Denied location?
  → It’s cool. We’ll guess. We’re chill like that.

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🌈 What’s Next?

I’m building in public — crying in private. Here's what’s coming up:

• 🎞️ Collaborative watchlists
• 🔊 Voice-based search
• 🤖 Better mood prediction using AI (GPT meets weather forecast??)

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🧩 Try It Out

Live App: https://shravandev.com/movienest\
Blog 1: Proxy, Debounce & Glassmorphism\
Blog 2: Virtual Scroll + Lazy Loading

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Thanks for scrolling through my chaos.
If your app isn’t emotional yet…
Are you even building full-stack? 😌

Built with care, mood swings, and navigator.geolocation —
Shravan 💻🍿