Gnome Trip

journey prompt
duration prompt
vibe prompt
2 of 3 home page images
spotify authentication
1 of 3 home page images
3 of 3 home page images
final page with spotify playlist

Inspiration

The three of us met in the Musical Motifs Living Learning Community our first year at Northeastern, and as third years still love to connect with others through music. We wanted to create a fun and light-hearted project that would allow users to create personalized playlists for their roadtrips so they can focus on making memories.

What it does

Connect with a users' Spotify account to create a personalized playlist for their roadtrip, and give them a cute personalized gnome buddy along with it.

How we built it

Backend

Python -Spotify API -Spotipy -Flask

Frontend

React -Javascript -Vite -Figma

Challenges we ran into

Little experience with Java and React, no experience with Spotify API or any API!
Working with Oauth and tokens was a struggle before we realized issues with port 5000 on Macs!
Spotify deprecated components of recommendation features in late November, and a lot of documentation online has still not been updated leading us to realize we were trying to use deprecated features halfway through the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully connects/authorizes with Spotify API
Able to get a connected backend and frontend
Creates a personalized playlist!
Bonus: Traveling gnome animation on home page

What we learned

This project forced our backend developers to dive head first into the Spotify API, and ultimately we had a lot of fun exploring the plethora of data available to us. Although realizing Spotify recently deprecated all of their recommendation features that would have allowed us to use things like target danceability levels to create our playlist, this change forced us to pivot into looking deeper into the Spotify API. We had to act quick to figure out what we could do with what was available to us and create a new go forward plan. Our frontend developer had never created webpages on her own before and had never linked to a backend. Forcing ourselves outside of our comfort zone for this project was stressful at times but paid off in our end result, and we learned a ton in the process!

What's next for Gnome Trip

There are a handful of of features we dreamed of Gnome Trip supporting but were unable to implement due to time and resource constraints. Firstly, we would like Gnome Trip to ask calculate the distance between a user’s starting and end destination and create an appropriately sized playlist for a user to listen to during their travels. Additionally, we would like to spruce up the UI (especially with more cute gnomes!) and take into account a user’s music preferences when designing their gnome/scene. We would also like to enhance our song recommendation function, create descriptive error pages for when things go wrong, and abstract away duplicated code.