// the find
joshwcomeau/Tello
🐣 A simple and delightful way to track and manage TV shows.
Tello is a personal TV show tracker built by Josh Comeau as a side project around 2017-2018. It pulls episode data from TVMaze and gives you a backlog/calendar view of what's next to watch. The codebase is really a React/Redux learning playground that happened to ship as a real product.
The component composition patterns are genuinely well-thought-out — things like Drift, Hover, and ScrollDisabler as pure behavior components (render-props style) were ahead of the curve for 2017 React. The MediaQuery-driven responsive routing using React Router 4's dynamic route model is a clever trick that holds up as a teaching example. Emotion CSS-in-JS is used consistently, keeping styles colocated without the usual specificity chaos. The back-end is intentionally thin — it's basically a MongoDB CRUD layer with Passport auth, which is the right call when 90% of the logic is client-side.
Abandoned since August 2018 — dependencies are years out of date, the live site is likely dead, and React class components with Redux boilerplate this verbose is tech you'd be migrating away from immediately. The MongoDB schema is never documented and there are no migrations, so if you clone and run this you're reverse-engineering the shape from Mongoose models. There's essentially no test coverage — one App.test.js placeholder and nothing else. TVMaze is the only data source with no fallback, so if that API changes behavior your episode data silently breaks.