Inspiration
Mainstream music, television and cinema all have abundant analytical platforms. However, we noticed that many niche forms of entertainment such as Japanese anime lack these tools. As avid anime watchers ourselves, we know the wide variety of genres out there and are familiar with the anime community's desire to analyze and share anime. We are confident that our project will be embraced by this community.
What it does
We decided to leverage the API of the popular anime database MyAnimeList (MAL) to provide users with dynamic, personalized analytics on their viewership. Our platform analyzes user trends to deliver detailed commentary about their anime viewing history and make suggestions for the future.
How we built it
After deciding on the idea, we spent a few hours on Figma prototyping our project and discussing what features to add. For the actual implementation, we created a GitHub repository with separate branches and worked on separate components on our own. In terms of the actual technologies, in the backend, we integrated MAL's RESTful API, writing a NodeJS script to implement OAuth authentication. In the frontend, we used AngularJS as our framework, wherein we wrote code in HTML, CSS preprocessors such as SCSS, and JavaScript/TypeScript.
Challenges we ran into
Our biggest challenge was definitely a lack of experience. With only one member experienced in web development frameworks, there was a learning curve for a lot of the team. However, the whole team learned on the job and contributed a fair amount to the final product.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Despite the aforementioned lack of experience, we accomplished a great amount in the little time we had to learn. We managed to make a great looking application, using open source themes and a user-friendly scrollable interface. Most importantly, we are very proud of how well we collaborated, treating everyone else with respect and fixing each other's bugs whenever required.
What we learned
We learned a great amount in front-end frameworks and languages, API integration including authentication, data analytics, and version control––skills that we will definitely build on in the future.
What's next for Anime Wrapped
- In the future we plan to make ML based personalized recommendations, such as using real-time user-generated data in models such as the multi-layered perceptron to supplement our current algorithm.
- We also strive to connect the anime community by adding social media integration, shareable content, and friend recommendations.
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