reflecting on my first "viral" project

now that the spotify wrapped season hype has finally died down, i've been thinking about the chaos of the last two months.

it's weird seeing the traffic drop off, but honestly, it's a relief. at the peak, i had around 2,500 wrappeds generated, and for a project running on a gunicorn server in my closet, i'm just glad nothing actually caught fire. (okay maybe im being slightly dramatic)

why i even built this

i used to be a spotify user, and honestly, the only thing i missed after switching was the wrapped at the end of the year. i'm a huge navidrome user now, but i still wanted that "wrapped" experience. since it didn't exist for the platforms i use, i just coded it myself.

i'm super grateful for all the last.fm, listenbrainz, and navidrome users who actually gave it a shot. seeing people use something i made to enjoy their music stats is peak.

the listenbrainz thing

the coolest part wasn't even the numbers, it was the fact that the ListenBrainz team actually noticed. they included make-a-wrapped in their official "year in music" event as a community project.

seeing a project you built for fun get recognized by the actual devs of the platform is a weird feeling. it makes all the debugging worth it.

technical regrets? lol

i’m still running this on my debian homelab (the old lenovo laptop i talked about in another post). looking back, using a raw gunicorn server as a systemctl service instead of a proper docker setup was definitely a choice. it worked, but it wasn't the "cleanest" way to handle a spike in users.

the hype def died down, but i'm proud of what i built. it was a challenge managing the traffic and seeing how far i could push my hardware.

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**if you used the tool and liked it, feel free to share it or hit the donate button. helps keep the servers (and my sanity) alive. :) <3**