I use Trello for everything. It only made sense (back when I did this) to put and track my movie collection into Trello.

It all started as an Excel file that I used to keep track of what movies I owned, where they were, who had them and what-not. As my development skills grew, the more I played with the movie list.

I always felt like I was in between technologies and didn't possess the necessary skills to pull off what I wanted to achieve. I used AutoHotkey, C# with WinForms, WPF, I even went the painful route of vanilla HTML. Ultimately, these projects all failed.

I finally got an ASP.NET project working running on a Virtual Server on my home computer. You can see the issues with this setup, right? And, running a Windows server on Azure or AWS is only free for a limited time. This was not going to make me money so those options were out.

Recently, I learned about AWS Lambda. No, I haven't been living under a rock. I just simply didn't know about it, not to mention how to hold it.

At any rate, I finally figured it out and I gotta say I'm very happy with it!

In a nutshell, here's what I did...

1. Created an FSharp Lambda project in Visual Studio
2. Wrote the logic for handling the events I was interested in
3. Hooked up the Lambda with an AWS API Gateway
4. Registered a Webhook event in Trello's API

The result:

• A new movie (Card) is added
• Trello fires a Webhook event to my Lambda function's URL
• The Lambda function
  • grabs the name of the new Card
  • asks The Internet Movie Database (not IMDB) for a match
  • selects the best match
  • updates the Card Title with the proper movie title
  • updates the Card Description with the movie's synopsis
  • updates the Card's Cover with the movie's poster

See it in action: