From Playlist Frustration to Building a Solution: Starting the Journey (Day 1 Setup)

Leaving Spotify recently brought an unexpected frustration: realizing I'd left behind countless hours of curating playlists. Those specific tracks in that specific order... they felt lost. Checking out SaaS options to transfer them felt disproportionately expensive for a single task.

This personal pain point sparked a 'what if': What if I could just build a simple, seamless web app to export my Spotify playlists directly to YouTube? A way to reclaim my music library without breaking the bank, and a fantastic opportunity to build a meaningful project for my web development portfolio.

The vision is clear: a user logs in, selects a Spotify playlist, and with a few clicks, sees it recreated on their YouTube account, maintaining the name and sequence. Simple, affordable, and effective.

Today expressing my Day 1 learnings of bringing this idea to reality – getting the core technical foundation in place.

Here's the initial stack I'm setting up:

• Frontend/Backend: Next.js – Choosing this for its full-stack capabilities, routing, and strong performance for building a modern web application.

• UI Components: shadcn/ui & Aceternity UI – Aiming for a polished, aesthetic, and responsive user interface right from the start, leveraging pre-built components to speed up development.

• API Integrations: The heart of the project – Spotify API (to fetch user playlists and track details) and YouTube Data API (to create playlists and search/add videos). Handling OAuth flows will be a key part here.

• Database: Neon DB – Going with a serverless Postgresql database hosted on Neon for scalability and ease of use.

• ORM: Prisma – Pairing Neon with Prisma ORM for type-safe database access and streamlined data management.

This initial setup feels solid. The next steps involve tackling the API authentication flows and starting to connect the frontend with the backend logic.

Excited about the journey ahead – the challenges of working with external APIs, optimising the transfer process, and building a clean user experience. I plan to share updates as I go.

If you've faced similar playlist migration headaches or are interested in web development project builds, follow along!