If you want to reserve those ideal, middle-of-the-theater seats at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema theaters for popular movies like "Steve Jobs" or "The Martian," you pretty much have to hover over your keyboard like you were waiting to buy tickets to a Taylor Swift concert.
Peter James, a veteran programmer, picked up on this problem a couple years ago. He found himself hitting up the Alamo on a regular basis, but he couldn't always get those choice seats. The theaters, which feature special screenings, special events and serve food and alcohol, have become wildly popular, especially when they have major release or live comedic movie events, such as Master Pancake.
James said he noticed a gap between when tickets were available on the Drafthouse website and when Drafthouse fans get notified with an e-mail. Then he started coding.
First, he built a screen scraper to query the site for new movie ticket sales. It worked well, but he knew it would fall apart if Alamo altered their website. So, he dug deeper and started grabbing ticket information from the underlying datafeed that populates showtimes on the website.
"That worked well for a while, then I decided that I wanted to open it up so others could use it easily," James said.
James is a senior software engineer at Good Technology, a California-based end-to-end mobile security company that is being acquired by BlackBerry for $425 million. He's been a software engineer in Austin for about 18 years, with stints at Trilogy, 3M and Macheen Inc.
He built the Alamo ticket alert for himself, initially, and decided to share it to help others who want to get the best seats well in advance of showtime. And he likes a challenge, even outside of his day job.
"This one was done in C#," he told someone who asked about the programming on Reddit. "I usually work in C# or Java, and since my day job is mostly Java, I did this in C# just to keep my chops up. I don't think there's anything special about it that couldn't be done in Java. I use a 3rd party library for sending the tweets, but I'm sure there's a Java equivalent that would get the job done just as well."
The Twitter bots James set up for each of the Alamo's six Austin locations -- plus a few others in other cities -- provide notifications the moment tickets are available for purchase online. He even built one for the popular Master Pancake series where comedians riff on the classics.
So, is anyone using the bots to get ticket?
"I was surprised," James said. "It's been going like crazy." Most of the bots have 75-100 followers, he said.
"I did reach out to the Drafthouse to let them know about it," James said. "They thought it was really cool, but they were in the middle of some big expansions at the time, and I didn't follow up with them."
James said he's also used similar coding tricks to be alerted of other hot tickets, including a Rush concert.
He said the Alamo programming took 10-20 hours on the software. "Actually setting up the Twitter accounts took about 8 hours itself to have it interact with software," he said.
(Image via Flickr by Bruce Turner. CC by 2.0.)
