Alamo Alerts

Alamo Alerts generates alerts on the fly when new movies are detected at a number of Alamo Drafthouse locations. These alerts can be found on a dedicated responsive website, or any of each location's individual Twitterbots which can give followers push notifications so they get the best seats for the newest movies.

This project started out when I got fed up with not getting any good seats when Drafthouse would send out emails for new showings, generally hours after the listing was made available on their actual website. After doing a little digging, I found that their ticketing API was open and public so I created a simple Python script to parse and digest the API as well as create entries on a simple database where I could reference what films had been detected previously. Once I was successfully able to stand up this script, I created Twitterbots for specific locations in Austin I wanted to be alerted about and set up the scripts to push Tweets to those accounts. In addition, a simple Vue site was set up to consume and display this data that surfaced the relevant RSS and Twitter feed links for each location.

One core feature I made sure to include (and one I hadn't seen before in any alerting system I had come across) was a way to have an additional alert when a theater would add screens to a film's opening weekend, opening up an additional opportunity to get the best seats in the house. To that end, I expanded the script to save and reference all of a film's opening weekend showtimes and look for any new times, as well as append badges to both those Tweets and the website.