I like to consider myself as a lifelong learner. However, I admit that I have been much more of a consumer than a creator and I think that in order to properly learn things, one must be both. This is why I am committing myself to building Spinlist in public. I'll be sharing my progress, the good and the bad, as I build this project. While this will be heavily focused on the technical aspects of building Spinlist, I'll also document the more nitty gritty things such as marketing and such.

So what is Spinlist? Spinlist is essentially a "Letterboxd for albums". Why Spinlist? First and foremost, I love music. I love all different kinds music. I love finding undiscovered and up-and-coming artists. I think this all stems from the time I spent on MySpace and getting familiar with the bands I found on there. That whole era shaped my current musical taste. Unfortunately, I find that music discovery is much less organic now. Everything is fed to us by the algorithm. Featured Spotify playlist are essentially curated by the king-makers. This isn't organic and the magic of music discovery has been lost.

Some of my most listened to artists have come from music recommendation from friends. With Spinlist, I want to continue fostering this idea. I want to find artists through the stuff my friends are listening to. I want them to find artists through the things I am listening to. I want to bring back that magic and toss the algorithm to the side. A music community for the people-by-the-people.

On a more technical-side, building Spinlist will serve as a proxy for me to familiarize myself with NextJS and improve on my system design skills. My most recent professional job leaned very heavily to the front-end so I didn't have a whole lot of exposure to things such as scalability, data modeling and a lot of the things that come with proper system design. I have read the books, the articles, I have watched the videos, but nothing is a better teacher than actually doing the thing.

In the next post, I'll go over the database schema and the tech stack I'll be using to build Spinlist. Stay tuned!