Inspiration
I was inspired to create Spelp because I was constantly finding myself unhappy with my spotify playlists. Every few weeks, the songs that had once been my favorite had now become something I couldn't bear listening to. Even worse, Spotify's playlist suggestions simply weren't good enough. I wanted to make something that allows music lovers like me to quickly share, rate, and review songs.
What it does
Spelp is, essentially, an extremely simplified version of online music raters. It allow users to enter a song including the song and artist names, classify the songs based on explicit-ness, genre, and if the song has words, and then give their opinion on several aspects of the song, including the melody, lyrics, emotional aspect, and of course, how much they enjoyed the song overall. Following the submission of their rating, their response will show up in place of the rating criteria, along with other ratings of the same song (if applicable). The “Spelp Score” (a number from 1-5) of the song is calculated based on the inputs of the user. This takes into account only the numerical aspects of the rating, and does a weighted average calculation (overall weighted 40%, melody and lyrics each weighted 20%, and emotion and speed each weighted 10%).
How we built it
This is my first hackathon, so I just ended up using the basic necessities. Pycharm was used to host all the code, and the web app was run locally using flask. I used bootstrap for the CSS framework, and used HTML and Javascript as well. I also followed some tutorials, which are credited in the code.
Challenges we ran into
At the start of the hackathon, I essentially had little to no experience with everything I needed to do, and couldn't even imagine creating some sort of a web app from scratch and code all the necessary components. It was pretty hard convincing myself that I should even try to start a project, as the task of finishing it all in just one week on my own was quite daunting (I was originally signed up in the ideathon and decided to just go ahead and try the hackathon). Furthermore, I was initially having trouble coming up with ideas that included a communication aspect and would also be feasible to build as a beginner, which took up quite a bit of my time. Once I came up with an idea though, it was a lot easier to focus on the task at hand, and most of the other problems I ran into while coding could be solved by googling or doing research.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I'm mainly proud of having something to show at the end of this week, and actually completing a hackathon (my first one)!! I think I've come a long way from where I was at the beginning of the hackathon, in terms of both technical knowledge and my faith in myself. While there is a lot more that I had wanted to accomplish but didn't end up having time to do, I'm so proud of what I have created, and look forward to doing this again in the future.
What we learned
My main takeaway from this is that, even in the midst of almost-finals season and Christmas recitals and six hour competitions and presentations and tests, I can do whatever I put my mind to (yes, cheesy, I know). In terms of technical skills, I learned how to create a web app, code new things using Python, implement bootstrap, inline CSS and script JS tags, and even upload a project into Github :'). And though it never formally was implemented into the project, I also learned how to create a mySQL database! These skills were all so very helpful and this was a great learning experience for me :D.
What's next for Spelp
The future of Spelp is bright. I hope to run the website on a server, and connect the song searches to a database, which will also store and display user ratings. User logins will also be connected to a database, and I want to add a tab where users can see their past ratings once logged in (to actually make the "log in to see your past reviews" statement true).
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