Inspiration
For the Mental Health Track, we were inspired to create an application that could help people deal with these depressing effects of the current global crisis. We believe that a mental health journal could be a potential solution to integrate what almost everyone universally loves -- music -- into our lives and allow us to reflect and check in with ourselves.
What it does
Our project, SpotJournal, is a daily journal where users can record their daily lives and feelings by comparing their emotional state before and after listening to a familiar, but random song pulled from their Spotify account. After submitting their reaction to the song, they can view how others have reacted to the same song; as well as, access the full features you would expect any journal to have.
How I built it
Our backend is implemented in Python Flask to get information about the user from the Spotify Web API and any user responses are stored on MySQL databases. Our web app’s frontend is produced from HTML generated by our Flask application, and the whole project is hosted and deployed on Google Cloud.
Challenges I ran into
Most of the challenges involved coordinating and managing our teamwork, such as setting up efficient and accessible workflows, keeping everyone up to date on recent changes, etc. On a technical note, learning to work with enterprise software was not the easiest of tasks, but we were able to overcome it through proper team coordination.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Not only did each of us approach newer territory and gain a lot of technical knowledge, but we are also very proud of our teamwork because of our effective communication and efficient delegation of work.
What I learned
The most important takeaway for our team is realizing the importance of iterative development. By approaching tasks step by step with frequent testing and synchronizing with each other, we were able to make continuous progress and be on the same page throughout the entire process.
What's next for SpotJournal
We currently have a domain for SpotJournal, spotjournal.space, that we are hoping will be able to host our project soon! Some areas of future development include allowing for more complex user input regarding their emotional states (such as choosing multiple emotions or rating them on scales), potentially producing a random song from an existing Spotify playlist like US Top 50 instead of a user’s recently played, and giving users the option to change the user base that the comparative rating histogram uses (i.e. showing data only from Spotify friends). Another big area we would like to explore is creating a recommended song playlist for a user based off of a given mood, using machine learning and the data we will be collecting.
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