The 2020 uOttahack was a hackathon that comprised of around 400 participants. Teams spent 36 consecutive hours coding for a specific streanm called “tracks”.

I was priveliged to work with Braden Collingwood, Sierra Potvin, and Derrick Wu; all from diverse streams of engineering, but nonetheless motivated to take on the challenge. Our end product was A Trebled Soul.

The track we participated in was Healthcare. While we were brainstorming, we had the idea to use Spotify’s Web API. Spotify uses an algorithm to estimate certain metrics of a song track, including acousticness, danceability, and energy. We wanted to visually represent these metrics and build a portfolio of a Spotify user’s tastes that represent their character.

Our final product used Spotify API to retrieve data. We used HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript to create the web application. React was used as a framework for reusable UI components and Material UI for faster React components. Learning how to use React for the first time was challenging, as there was a significant learning curve. Regardless, our product turned out more than satisfactory for a first hack; it’s functional and it looks presentable.

We registered atrebledsoul.space for our domain name, a pun I devised based on my experience in music theory. This produced a grin from our judge and led to us winning Best Domain Name. So we technically won our first hackathon!

You can check our app here. You’ll need to login with your Spotify account. You will see your most recently liked songs listed with their metrics. You can press “Enable Player” and then press ► on a song to play it.

Devpost