SoundNest

Backstory

SoundNest was the year-long project for the Object-Oriented Programming course in my third semester. The brief was a virtual album store with its own database and a front-end app. Plain HTML felt too easy, so we picked React with Electron for the client and a Flask REST API for the backend. We had one strict rule: no AI at all. That made Electron's IPC a wall I sat in front of for hours before it finally clicked. I came home every day and wrote code until the evening for two or three months, and we finished the whole thing by the middle of the semester, so we did not have to attend for the rest of the year. Builds were slow in development, so I added a loading screen with a small easter egg, and then the production build turned out so fast that the loading screen never showed up. We had never used Figma, so the UI was modelled on Spotify. It ended up as the best app of our year. During the final demo the trade mechanic threw an exception and took the database down with it, which is a lesson in itself.

• The team's motivation did not match mine. Tasks were split on "trust me, I'll do it", and most of them came back to me. The commit history shows who did what.
• React was still fairly new to me, and Electron's IPC between the main and renderer processes took hours of reading before it worked.
• No AI meant learning everything from documentation and examples, which was slower but taught me far more.
• The trade-offer feature crashed the database during the final presentation.

• Agree on ownership up front. A task without one clear owner is a task that ends up with whoever cares most.
• Measure the production build before optimizing for the development one. The loading screen solved a problem that only existed in dev.
• Test the exact demo path before a presentation, not only the features one by one.