Alright, so I wanted to mess around with Neon, specifically with their serverless jobs feature. I had this idea for a small project – pulling movie data, you know, just for fun. Figured it would be a good way to get my hands dirty. Here’s how it went down.
First, I signed up for Neon. Pretty straightforward, you just need an account. Then I created a new project. I think I called it “movie-stuff” or something equally uninspired.
Setting Things Up
Next, I needed a database. Neon makes this super easy, it’s all serverless, so you don’t have to worry about managing servers or anything. I just clicked a button and boom, database ready to go. I think I named the table “movies”. Original, I know.
Now for the “jobs” part. This is where things get interesting. I wanted to automatically fetch movie data from somewhere and dump it into my database. Neon has this “Jobs” feature that lets you run code on a schedule, kind of like cron jobs, but, you know, serverless.
The Coding Bit
I whipped up a quick script. Nothing fancy, just some basic code to grab movie titles and maybe some other info. I am not great at describing every step in coding because I am just an amateur. I think I used Javascript, because Neon’s docs mention Javascript/Typescript. It’s really very simple, just some loops and fetching data.
- I figured out which API to use, for the movie details.
- I wrote a simple loop that gets the data from the API.
- I added some basic functions to store the movie data into my Neon database.
Making it Run
Back in Neon, I created a new job. I pasted my code into their editor, set a schedule (I think I made it run once a day, just to test), and hit “save”.
Then, I waited. I wasn’t sure if it would work, to be honest. But after a while, I checked my database, and there it was! Movie titles started popping up. Success!
It wasn’t perfect, of course. I had to tweak the code a few times to get everything right, and there are still some things I want to improve. But overall, it was a pretty smooth experience. Neon’s jobs feature seems pretty handy for this kind of stuff, especially if you just want to automate some simple tasks without dealing with server setup.
I plan to add some more features, like maybe fetching ratings or release dates. And maybe even building a simple front-end to display the data. But for now, I’m pretty happy with my little movie data pipeline.
