Launch Party

What fun is listening to an album drop all by yourself?? It's no fun at all!! Now, with Launch Party, you can listen along, react and chat with other fans in realtime!

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Inspiration

Live threads on reddit for album releases are a total mess. The Spotify UI also doesn't give much info on artists.

What it does

Lets you listen to a new album with other fans and see live feedback, comments, and overall thoughts/data once the album listen is over. All data is timestamped and saved, so artists have access to high fidelity data on first impressions.

How we built it

We built a prototype flow in Adobe Xd to nail the UI/UX, then moved onto a vanilla JS prototype. We started to run into trouble so we switched to NextJS, inspired by the HackCU workshop. We implemented the back-end with a Flask server and SQLite3 database, and we used socket.io to implement chat functionality between server and client.

Challenges we ran into

  • CORS.... the horror....
  • State management in React
  • Working with styles hooks in Material-UI
  • Data fetching with NextJS
  • Auth flow using 2 servers and a third party endpoint
  • Setting unique keys for React components (this is so weirdly difficult)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got a working MVP that nicely reflects our UI/UX design plan, and we are well on our way to achieving our reach goals as well. We solved some unbelievably challenging problems and worked with each other very synergistically.

What we learned

  • Way too much about networking protocols (specifically HTTP)
  • The nuances of SSR, CSR, SG etc.
  • The limitations of vanilla JS but also the frustrations of modern web frameworks

What's next for Launch Party

Finishing implementing the chat functionality, refine MVP UX/UI, and host the service publicly. We think we're close to a version 1.0

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