sounds.fyi

A Spotify-powered playground for discovering personalized sound

2017SpotifyReactReduxPersonal project

sounds.fyi is a personal product I built to explore ideas quickly while still treating engineering quality as non‑negotiable. It’s a platform that helps you discover personalized Spotify “sounds” based on your recent listening, top tracks, or tracks you select—using the Spotify Web API to enrich your account with new insights.simon+1

It’s also my long-running code playground: a place where I validate product ideas, experiment with UX patterns, and keep sharpening my full-stack problem-solving skills.

The platform is currently offline, due to lack of time for maintenance and updates.

The challenge

Spotify has an incredible catalog, but discovery can still feel repetitive—especially if you keep circling the same artists and playlists. sounds.fyi focuses on turning your own listening behavior into a better starting point for exploration: “show me more of what I actually listen to, but with a twist.” Adding some filters and rules to the mix.

My role and contribution

Creator / Full-stack Developer — from concept to implementation, including UX, frontend, and platform ownership over multiple years.

What I worked on

Personalized discovery

sounds.fyi uses your recent activity, most listened tracks, or selected tracks as input to generate personalized discovery. The core value is that the recommendations start from your taste, not generic charts. You can interact with various sliders to filter the results to your liking.

Spotify Web API

The platform integrates with the Spotify Web API to pull listening data and generate new views and features around your account. That API-first integration shaped everything: authentication, data fetching patterns, and how the UI responds to user context.

It is all session-based; therefore, no data is saved, and everything is owned by either Spotify or the user.

Real infrastructure

Sounds.fyi was previously hosted on AWS and sponsored by AWS Activate for Startups, making it a practical environment for deploying and running a real product over time.

Tech stack

React
Redux
Spotify Web API
Modular Components
AWS

Why this work matters

Product thinking + engineering discipline
Because it’s an owned product, I can iterate on UX and features while keeping the codebase structured—exactly the balance enterprise teams need as a product evolves.

A proving ground for UI patterns
Many of the UI and workflow ideas I use in client work come from projects like this: building, shipping, learning, and refining the patterns that make interfaces feel fast and coherent.