⚠️Hey! We don't have a video, sorry :/ check out the sick song instead

Inspiration

Messaging apps are often very boring, and result in a lot of spam. What if we had some way of limiting interactions to something extremely meaningful and enjoyable?

What it does

It's a standard messaging app, except you can only send song lyrics. If you try to send a message which isn't song lyrics the message just won't be sent. This is based on a freeform input field, so you really have to know your stuff.

How we built it

The backend is built with Rust (almost totally new to all of us!) and the frontend originally with Flutter (also new to us!), but in the end with React since we were running out of time. We chose these because we wanted to learn something new!

The checking of whether a message is song lyrics is done with the Genius API.

Challenges we ran into

Flutter is a bit of hard work, and we've never worked with Dart before. So in the end we had to switch over to something more familiar to us.

Rust is also extremely challenging if you've not worked with it before, and we had some real struggles getting it hooked up to a Postgres database. But it worked in the end!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It (pretty much) works!

What we learned

A whole load of stuff about Rust and Postgres. Also some stuff about Flutter, but not as much as we would have liked.

What's next for msglyrics

The backend is a bit sketchy, and the frontend could do with some polish.

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