I'm most passionate about coding when I'm solving a problem. On the micro level, that means I actually enjoy debugging. On the macro level, it means I'm more invested in a project if it's useful. I'm building this app because it's hard to manage a massive playlist, but I get bored of shorter ones more quickly than I have the time or energy to update them.

The idea is that instead of only being able to add a song to a playlist, you can add an artist, album, or playlist as well. Each artist, album or playlist will generate a pool of songs for that slot and a random one will be selected. During playback when one of these songs is done playing or skipped, a new song from the pool is selected to replace that song, creating more variety with less effort.

This was a small side project I made towards the end of bootcamp to help with behavioral interviews. I developed a Python web scraper to get questions from a site so I could serve them up randomly. The dog interviewer helps the user feel more comfortable. I've always found imagining people as dogs to be more helpful than imagining them naked! Based on advice I'd read online, I also added webcam recording so the user can record and critique themselves on playback, and a timer to help with pacing. Perhaps one day I'll revisit this project integrate LLM capabilities so it can really be more of a conversation.

Technical Challenges:

I had no clue about video or webcams before this project. Although the react-webcam package made it simple to display and record video, getting the download working was harder than expected. I had to learn how to handle data that came in streaming chunks so it could be saved as a whole and downloaded. These concepts came in useful at work when I had to write scripts that processed large csv files.

I love books and messing about with data, so I got really into this project when I was going through some of the Odin Project coursework for full-stack development before I joined a bootcamp. It features adding a book, deleting a book, searching, sorting, filtering and reseting the library. This was maybe a month into learning JavaScript so I only implemented local storage to retain data.

Biggest Lesson:

Google, Google, Google. I actually wrote up my own sort and filter functions because I hadn't learned about built-in array functions in JS. It's always worth it to see if the problem you're trying to solve has already been solved by someone else.