JoepTube
JoepTube is the name of a webservice I programmed as a part of nutshotters.nl. Although the website is now offline, it used to be a website for my group of friends and also served as my own online playground for projects like the useless website generator and this one. However, JoepTube was, in my opinion, the coolest feature of this website, and therefore deserves its own place on my portfolio.
I was inspired to make this project by the music system from Proto, the study association of Creative Technology. In Protopolis (The name of the Proto room), the music is handled very well, in my opinion. Every time I'm in there, there is music playing and I often hear new music that I didn’t knew before. At times this is just a radio station playing, but there is another system as well: ProTube. ProTube is a system created by Creative Technology students themselves. It works as follows: Everybody can add YouTube links to the queue. I believe the videos must adhere to some requirements (like a maximum duration and none from a blacklist, etc.). But if they make it to the queue, they will be played in the order when they're added. Everybody can listen to this. Multiple devices can listen at the same time.
The Proto Board remains in control, however. They can blacklist certain songs or people. They can change the order of the queue. They can skip or pause currently playing songs. They can even disable ProTube altogether. I developed a similar system called JoepTube. What's really nice about this system is that there is no more discussion about the music at parties for example. You just sacrifice one device and the music is handled by everybody from there on out. JoepTube works on every device with internet, so it also works on smart TVs, for example. This is very nice since it also plays the video clips.
Flawless?
JoepTube wasn't as flawless as ProTube if I'm completely honest. I wasn't super skilled at Web Development at the time I made this, but I learned a lot from it. Nevertheless, JoepTube worked like a charm. You could easily watch or add videos. It worked quite intuitive and didn’t require any additional form of explanation to be used. You could easily see what songs were coming up next or how to add a song. But, let's have a look at some of the downsides of JoepTube compared to ProTube.
Although it functioned very well for most scenarios. JoepTube did lack some features that were present in ProTube. For starters, I was unable to synchronize JoepTube if listened to on multiple devices. You could listen to the same song, but it played from the start. This wasn't a big problem for JoepTube, since it was just for my group of friends. But I would've liked to have this feature as well. JoepTube also didn't have any analytics. ProTube remembers exactly which song was played when and by who it was queued. This means that Proto is able to do interesting analysis such as "What is the most played song this month?" or "Who has added the most songs in 2018?". Although this feature wasn't really necessary in JoepTube, I personally believe its presence is indicative of a well-programmed system.
Godmode
What JoepTube did have was a so-called godmode. Whilst in Godmode, you can do everything the Proto Board can do on ProTube (change the queue, skip songs, etc.). Naturally, I was the only person able to access this mode. Although now offline, JoepTube was very useful for me and my development as a Web Developer. I had to do a lot of research myself and learned a lot about the YouTube API, PHP, AJAX and SQL. This is one of those projects that I use to distinguish myself from other Creative Technologists.