My Albums App (a Foray into Personal Coding Projects)

€mily — Wed, 20 May 2020 20:24:02 +0000

What's this?

I'm sharing my experience and progress in working on one of my personal coding projects. This is one of my earlier ones that I started in junior year of college. It's still a WIP as I continue adding features and tweaking the design.

The project

The project is currently titled "my-albums-app". It's a webapp that displays the albums I've listened to in the past few years. I have a database that stores all of this information about albums and artists. I'm working on creating statistics pages for each year to see information about the music I listened to each year and see if I can find any patterns (for example, genres or artists that I listened to and if any new interests showed up).

Link to Code

emilywritescode / my-albums-app

Webapp that keeps track of all of the albums I've listened to each year.

my-albums-app

Screenshot of the welcome page to my-albums-app (as of January 2020)

Development process

January 2019 - March 2019: Originally this was a barebones Flask app connecting to a MySQL database. A few HTML pages. The beginnings of using APIs to display more data about albums.
March 21, 2019: I started transitioning to an Angular frontend.
April 4, 2019: App now fetches info about albums and artists from Spotify API (with Spotipy), LastFM API
April 6, 2019: App now fetches social media info about artists from WikiData.
May 20, 2019: Moved artist functions to separate module, changes to artist fetching with new MySQL database table.
December 2019: We're back and readying for the new year (and decade)! I am currently working on stylistic changes and adding more to the artist pages, including links to listened albums pages for albums by that artist.

View on GitHub

How I built it

This project has an Angular2 frontend with a Flask/Python backend. The database is MySQL. When I first started working on this project, I had recently completed a class project using this tech stack, so I based off of what I learned there. I also really first started using Github for code tracking with that class project.

Additional Thoughts

I'm not the best with frontend design. I think the functionality is there, but my app doesn't look the best. Ah well, still working on making it something I'm proud of! Further, I need to figure out to host the web app so others can look at my musical tastes!

DEV Community: €mily