Category Archives: Music

My Valentines / Music Hack Day NYC app!

Dev, Django, Music, NYC, Pals, Python, , , ,

-or-
Why I wasn’t around this weekend.

I was at NYC Music Hack Day!

You can try out the idea here in our valentune.es beta. We send love and music over wires and wireless to your special sweetheart.

You put in your sweetheart’s Name & cellphone, a couple of key words about your them and then ask the app to get busy.

It goes out to the MusixMatch lyrics service – finds lyrics that describe your sweetheart and then gives you a list of songs we can find streaming full mp3s online for. You choose what you don’t want in the play list and hit send.

We call your sweetheart up using the Twilio API , give them your sweet message and then play them your custom made mixtape over the phone! Yes, my lovely wife Sam was the first non-developer to get a call from the valentun.es robot.

Getting SongsPick songs on the iPhone!

Don’t have a web browser handy? Surely you jest! If you’ve got an iPhone you can use the iPhone app.

If not, the website is mobile compliant and works great on Android phones. The website uses CSS3 and WebFonts for style, but degrades well to older browsers. How old? IT WORKS ON LYNX!in case you need web 3.0 from a terminal

So all of this was accomplished by 6 talented and dedicated people over the course of 24 hours in NYC. The whole team was positive and awesome. I’m really proud of what we did so quickly. It’s got bugs 1 , but it works. I didn’t sleep the whole 24 hour hack session and I worked on a lot of the bits.

  • The Musixmatch call to find lyrics that talk about your sweetheart.
  • The Skreemr call to find playable songs with those lyrics
  • Adapting Jeff’s web mockups to Django templates
  • Calling into Alex’s Twilio wrapper
  • Pitching the idea and the vision and recruiting the group
  • Helping design the process flow and settling on using Django with Nate
  • Helping coordinate who would do what and figuring out the pitch with Jeff
  • Presenting the whole thing in 2 minutes to over 300 people with Anna and Nate

It was a busy 24 hours!

  1. the Title element has the wrong spelling of valentunes and the message doesn’t always go through and the songs sometimes take a long time to play, etc…   (back)