Backstory — During the Covid-19 pandemic, I befriended professors, scientists, and researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, CA and some of their friends and colleagues. All thanks to good friend Russell Seyfert. We bonded over our mutual love of music and art.

The Problem

Since the start of the group, the power hours were constructed using a website called MyTube60. Unfortunately, the website is not maintained often and has a bad user experience — 500 errors, no new users can create accounts, database issues preventing login and power hour presenting, etc.

Project Scope, Goals, and Process

Due to the shortcomings of MyTube60, I decided a gift to my friends for 2023 would be a new application to allow users to host and participate in power hour creation and curating.

Goals

A simplified version of the application will be released first. After some user interviews with my friends and additional testing, I will refine and release a second version.

Here are the needs/user stories for a v1 release:

• A user can signup and create an account.
• A user can login and edit parts of their account.
• When logged in, a user has full CRUD with the power hour playlists they host.
• When logged in and participating in a power hour (not hosting), a user has full CRUD with the songs they contributed in the playlist.
• A host can edit the publish status so participants can only contribute to published power hours.
• A host can edit the privacy status so power hours can be public or private.

Here are the additional features that are planned for a v2 release:

• Embedded YouTube search
• Multiplatform music player that allow users to add songs from other sources like Bandcamp and Soundcloud

The Solution / Results

The project is complete and I was able to add YouTube search and use web scraping to render search results instead of using the Google API.

I’m proud to add that the application also has user invitation management. Once a power hour is published, a host is able to share a promo link with a random code that is unique to that power hour. When a user is logged in and uses that link in a browser, an invitation will be created for them (as long as they are not the host and an invitation to that power hour has not been created already for them). From there, the user can choose between “Yes,” “Maybe,” or “No” to indicate their interest in the event. Once the power hour’s date has passed, the invitation is automatically deleted.