I’ve started a new project two days ago, the idea for which has been in my head for quite a while, and I’ve even managed to implement a proof of concept in Golang.

The basic idea is that two people log in on a website via Spotify, the app fetches their music libraries from the Spotify API and computes the intersection of their music libraries, so they can have a playlist they can both listen to together.

The name Project 42 is a codename, “42” in this case means “four two”, because the app helps make playlists for two people.

I thought to myself that it might be a good idea to blog the progress, so that I can keep track of what I learn and reference it later.

Tech stack

Originally I wrote the proof of concept in Golang, mainly because I was fascinated by that language at the time. Now, I wish to learn Ruby on Rails, so naturally I chose that as the basis for the project.

I knew I needed to be able to run jobs in background (to fetch large music libraries) and have a way to report the progress to the user. Golang has wonderful features for that - goroutines and channels, and the gorilla/websocket library solves the progress-reporting problem.

So I began looking for Rails-based alternatives, and turns out Rails has all I need built in:

• Active Job is a framework provided by Rails for declaring and running background jobs in queues.

• Active Cable is Rails’s solution for websocket communication, it is built into Rails since the 5th version and also provides a client-side library.

The last missing part was a library for the Spotify API, but a quick Google search led me to RSpotify which contains everything I need, including an OmniAuth provider.

I really hope I can finish this project this time. I’ll try to come up with some deadlines to make sure I stay focused and I’ll try to post a progress update whenever I reach a deadline. Well, that’s it for today.