Inspiration
Everyone in our team is a musician, and we had all used or heard of a website called Ultimate Guitar (UG). UG is one of the only websites that provides “chords over words” music for guitarists for free. UG has always supported themselves with non-intrusive advertising, but as of the last year or so they have begun to force mobile users to pay extra for an app if they want to access any music. Their other advertising has become much more intrusive as well. We get it, the company wants to be profitable and keep the lights on. There isn’t anything wrong with that, right? The problem is that this website has always crowdsourced all of their music creation, so the website is literally built on the backs of those that use it. To us, that feels like betrayal, and we decided to develop our own website that can serve the same purpose while including some of our own original ideas.
What it does
Allows users to create, view, and share sheet music. Users that have logged in with Facebook credentials are able to create new songs, see what songs they have posted in the past, and search for songs that other users have added.
How we built it
Two members of our group have had quite a bit of experience with PHP, and so we decided to teach the other two members of our team PHP while expanding on what we have learned before by using the Laravel PHP framework (allows more intuitive MVC design among many other things), and by using Firebase as our database.
Challenges we ran into
Getting started is usually really easy, but we had to work rapidly at the end to finish some problems with our database connections to the site, which was confounded by the fact that we hadn’t slept in more than 40 hours. I got to the point where I couldn’t remember what I was doing from the time I found a problem to the time I got back in the code and found the problems location. These were fun challenges though, we had a great team.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Having a fully functional prototype was very important to us. We wanted something tangible to show off so that we could feel productive and successful at the end of MHacks. We did it! There is always more that would be fun to add, but we will hopefully be getting that done in the next couple weeks.
What we learned
Some of our group had never touched web dev before, and some of our group had lots of experience, so our learning was both broad and very deep.
What's next for The Master of the Chords
We plan to finish working out the kinks, and it will be online in the next couple weeks!
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