During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, I connected with professors and researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography—brought together by our shared love of music and art—and we started hosting “power hours” to keep our spirits up and our playlists fresh.

We quickly ran into hurdles with the tool we were using, MyTube60: frequent 500 errors, broken account creation flows, and database glitches that prevented new users from joining or contributing reliably. It became clear that if we wanted a seamless, joyful experience, we needed to build something better.

That realization led me to create Drop The Needle as a 2023 gift for my friends. I envisioned an application where anyone could sign up, log in, and either host a power hour—managing their own playlist—or participate by adding their favorite tracks.

For the initial version, I focused on core user stories: enabling secure signup and login, full CRUD (create, read, update, delete) for hosts managing power hour playlists, CRUD for participants contributing songs, and controls for publish and privacy settings so hosts could determine when and with whom a power hour went live.

Beyond that, I sketched out a plan for a second release that would bring embedded YouTube search directly into the app and a multiplatform music player, letting users pull in tracks from Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and other services.

By launch, Drop The Needle offered YouTube search powered by web scraping (avoiding API quotas), plus an invitation system where hosts could generate unique promo links. Guests using a link would automatically receive an invitation they could RSVP to (“Yes,” “Maybe,” or “No”), and all invitations would clean up themselves once the event date passed.

Under the hood, I built the app with Next.js and TypeScript, managed state with Redux, styled with TailwindCSS and CSS, and structured data with GraphQL via Prisma on a PostgreSQL database. I deployed to Vercel and crafted the UI assets in Figma, Photoshop, and Illustrator.

Working on Drop The Needle sharpened my full‑stack development skills and allowed me to deliver a personalized, robust experience to a community I value—while laying the groundwork for richer features and integrations in future versions.