A streaming animation of all the edits to a given Wikipedia page, embedded in a Flask application.

WikiFilms works by driving a headless chromium Browser from the server. The browser acts as a "virtual camera," taking snapshots of the relevant webpages and streaming the pixel data right to your browser.

I thought it would be cool to see. I don't have a better reason...sorry.

You can find a mostly-broken version deployed at https://wikifilms.herokuapp.com. As time allows, I will return to this project to move much of the functionality into background tasks, utilizing redis or another in-memory queue.

• The MediaWiki action API is amazing.

• generators for streaming data (https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/2.0.x/patterns/streaming/)
• async/await (did not use in the end).

• Sped up development of new features.
• Got good feedback about my programming practices.
• I met nice people at the Recurse Center :)

• Touched jquery for the first time
• Played with cv2 and facial recognition by accident

• Building a loading screen
• Introducing a task queue with Redis and possibly Celery
• Adding an ending frame
• Making jquery autocomplete suggestions more responsive
• Using responses from the MediaWiki API more effectively
• Exploring methods for composing an image from a headless web browser
  • should I render the HTML myself instead of saving to image?