Ten months ago I decided to change course into Software Engineering, something I held passion for throughout my life, but rarely explored. In college, I studied Audio Engineering and was a Computer Science Minor because I thought coding could be something fun to try out. However, my advisor advised me to switch minors as having a Music Business minor would allow me to take more Audio Engineering classes, and valuing his guidance I did eventually cave and make that switch. However, before the switch I was taking classes in Java and other languages, and those classes really stuck with me into my adult life in ways I could have never forseen. Even in my successful audio engineering career where I worked within Grammy-winning teams, my mind was always drawn back to coding. I wanted to know how the software we used worked, and I was always the first to volunteer to learn how to do audio programming in video games (something that required the audio engineer volunteer to go home and learn how to use a coding middleware to add audio files) because I actually liked the coding aspect. It wasn’t a chore for me like it was for some of the other engineers, and pretty soon I had a Udemy library full of basic coding tutorials and languages I was playing at in my free time.
As programmers, one of our core instincts is the desire to actually create our favorite websites, to know how they were created and build them ourselves - demystifying these programs we use every single day. Personally, the website I spend the most time on is Spotify. As an audio engineer and programmer, I’m constantly using the site to listen to client music, creating playlists that inspire my work, and in general enjoying music as I go about my daily activities. When I first began this journey, I knew I wanted to learn programming to add to my skills that I utililize in the music industry, and it was a perfect final project to finally mesh my love of the music industry and my love of programming. Spotify is a complex website, so I challenged myself to make a similar program using Redux. Though it isn’t an exact duplicate, I emulated a lot of the core Spotify features and created a very user friendly interface. I got a little excited working on this so the amount of code that went into this is far too much to explain in a singular blog post, so I’d like to talk about the feature that I think most developers have had issues with when they’ve tried to create a Spotify application: actually playing music from the application.
Every year, my friends and I have a Harry Potter themed Halloween party. At this party, we all take a house test and get sorted into one of four Hogwarts Houses: Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff. Then, we play board games all night. Each one of the games allows a chance for house members to score points for their house, and at the end of the night, one of the four houses takes home the house cup. It gets quite competitive if I’m being honest, and when I was brainstorming an idea for a Javascript app I thought: “Hey, why don’t you make something you and your friends can actually use?” We can’t get together for any Harry Potter parties during COVID because we are all cognizant of safety, so I thought I could replicate the magic of sorting into houses and playing games to score points for a house online. Thus, the Hogwarts Sorting Cup App was born.
To find inspiration for this project, I admittedly went with something I already consider to be one of my favorite hobbies. I’m a fantasy football enthusiast, and ever since I started this journey into coding, I couldn’t help but constantly wonder, “How do these fantasy football websites work?” Obviously, at this stage of coding I can’t create something that updates a player’s score the second they score a touchdown like NFL and ESPN have the capability of doing, but I figured I could make something that could at least perform the basic fantasy football app abilities. The ability for a user to create a team, add players to that team, and play another team resulting in a win or loss based on how many points those players score.
In finding inspiration for this project, admittedly I just pulled from what I’ve been watching most with my family lately. My family is outright OBSESSED with ghost adventures and the wacky stories from Zak Bagans, so I thought it might be fun and interesting to build an app where users can submit hauntings, track how many ghost sightings they’ve had, and compare the amount of sightings they’ve had with other users for some friendly competition.