UpKeep

Inspiration

A few days ago, Big Sean released a new album, I Decided, and I was the last one to know about it. My friends made fun of me for never having heard that the album was going to happen, much less drop. Hoping to never have this happen again, we built this app with limited knowledge of HTML and no knowledge of Javascript, CSS, APIs, or web apps in general. We wanted a challenge.

What it does

With limited knowledge of the CSS/Javascript/HTML framework and their interactions with APIs, a lot of time was spent on learning the basics rather than implementing many functions. Our website's home page has a slideshow and in the future will have the ability to have the most recent 3 albums loaded, but for now has some beautifully-designed album covers that fade in. Also on the home page is a search bar that will give an artist (or other query)'s most recent album covers.

The website has the ability to log in to someone's Spotify account and will give the user his or her personal information like when they first signed up, their profile picture, their username, and the amount of artists they follow.

In the future, we hope to implement the ability to keep track of accounts and the artists they follow, send out e-mails when an album drops on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Soundcloud, or any other streaming service, and the ability to click an album cover and be able to click and play any of the songs in the album.

How we built it

Building this website was a challenge due to our lack of experience with this type of front-end project. We used JSFiddle for real-time collaboration while each of us researched different ideas, APIs, example code, and the like. We took example from many other Spotify API projects but none of them could really crossover and required a lot of tweaking.

Challenges we ran into

Easily the major challenge was working with three languages where 3/4 of us had no previous knowledge and 1/4 had little experience with HTML. Any basic functions, syntax, and methods required research. We also have never worked with an API and figuring out implementation was difficult and time consuming. Having a user login to their Spotify account and having a search bar that brings up different album covers took all night.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We think the greatest accomplishment is having a project to submit and sticking with it through the night. It was a great character builder for all of us and was a great first hackathon. Being able to go from nothing to something is a very fulfilling experience, especially through all of the challenges we ran into.

What we learned

A lot. Everything we did for the last 24 hours was learning. From being our first hackathon to our first experience with APIs and front-end coding, it was all a blast working through it and learning it all.