Music Hack Day Paris 2014 and other projects

José M. Pérez

José M. Pérez / April 20, 2014

2 min read188 views

It's been some time since my previous post and I wanted to write a short one telling what has been going on.

Personal projects

I have several small personal projects around Spotify in which I am working in my free time. I recently attended the Music Hack Day Paris 2014, where I coded Spotify iQuiz, an iQuiz-like web app that uses your Spotify playlists and to create some questions about albums and tracks you saved. I think the most fun part is the Speech Synthesis API, which provides a very easy to use text-to-voice feature, right on your browser.

For these hack projects I definitely need some framework on which build quickly a project. I always try to avoid it at first, and end up using a template engine (when I'm fed up of generating markup using JS), plus too many DOM manipulations and a bad time fixing small issues. This time I started from this template I built, which was helpful for combining and minimizing all the small JS modules I created, and generate the files that I would deploy.

I'm also starting to take into account tests and code coverage earlier in the development process. I am applying it to the spotify-web-api-js project using grunt with mocha and blanket. I am running tests and checking the coverage from the console as I save files. I have unsuccessfully tried to generate LCOV that I can report to Coveralls, and I think that having the output in the console is good so far.

Paris

Well, and apart from that I got the chance of visiting Paris again after 14 years!

Eiffel Tower