Moody
Yet another music app… But what’s better than music to express your feelings? Moody is a web application that plays different music playlists according to a specific human emotion. It works with Spotify’s API to stream on the browser a random music playlist that is appropriate for the desired emotion selected by the user.
Elevator pitch
Moody exists to accentuate the user’s emotion and to make his experience as simple and fast as possible. He doesn’t have to look for the right songs, Moody searches for an appropriate playlist and reproduces on the browser.
Playing the playlist sadness on Moody
Results
I led this project since my two teammates were just introduced to web development. It was an opportunity for me to manage an English-speaking team as they also were exchange students.
The application is meant to be simple and lightweight, we think that we achieved this. The user accesses the application and is asked to choose a mood right away. The music starts playing as soon as the user presses the play button.
The structure is easily extendable and understandable so the project can be developed further quite easily. As a possible extension, we thought about implementing the Echo Nest API to extract the mood of relevant songs by their BPM, mode, rhythm, etc.
My thoughts on the app
I’m so glad I finally got to try React. I love the simplicity of that library. Sure, I took some time to get used to this new architecture (with Redux), but I’m so happy not to have used the MVC pattern on this project. As a lot of people, I was quite reluctant at first when I was introduced to JSX, but now it makes sense. I feel like Dan Abramov is the new David Bowie, he made it cool to [make your code] look weird.
Reactive and functional programming all the way. I’ve been writing everything single line of code as functional as possible lately, and I’ve been loving that. Redux fits so well to this paradigm and it made me aware of the importance of avoiding side effects.
ES2015 looks so neat. I’ve fallen in love with this new standard. It goes straight to the point and I’m so excited about the future of JavaScript.
One sure thing, I will definitely stick to these technologies for a while.
ES2015 ♥️ React ♥️ Redux