🎄Dear music lovers,

I hope you are all well, and excited about the new year to come! Let me give you a few news about Openwhyd.

As you know, I do my best to make sure that Openwhyd stays functional, by fixing critical bugs and restarting the server whenever it goes down. 😅This is good for us, Openwhyd users, but wouldn't it be even better if we could actually improve our experience on the service? For instance, by developing an Android app, by supporting background playback from openwhyd.org, or even by suggesting new tracks to discover and people to follow, based on each user's musical taste?

As Openwhyd is a volunteer effort (i.e. we do not have enough funds to provide a financial compensation to contributors, including myself), I can only invest a limited amount of free time in it. So, if we want Openwhyd to become more awesome, we need more developers to contribute to our open-source project. 💪

That's why, on top of making sure that Openwhyd stays functional, I decided to invest some additional time to communicate about Openwhyd towards several communities of developers. As I told you last month, I presented our open-source project at a developer event (the screening of GitHub Universe 2018, at Algolia Paris). More recently, I also gave a keynote at the CTO Pizza Live meetup (at NUMA Paris) and participated to two Hackergarten meetups, where I presented it again, and worked with 3 developers that were present on two exciting projects:

• Developing a music recommendation system in Python, based on Openwhyd's listening history.
• Developing a OAuth bridge for Openwhyd's API, in order to allow anyone to develop their own Openwhyd app, on the web or mobile, while allowing Openwhyd users to connect to their account from these apps.

Isn't that exciting?! 😃

While I will do my best to keep working with these developers, and to attract more of them by presenting Openwhyd in developer events, I could use your help! There are several ways you can help me with this:

• Like me, you could show up at developer and data scientist events, and motivate people to join our effort.
• If you know developers who love music, please invite them to contribute to our open-source project. I'd be happy to help them get started, even if they never used GitHub!
• If you enjoy writing or communication on social media, you could help by opening our official Instagram account and sharing music from Openwhyd on it, write articles and interviews of your favorite Openwhyd users in a blog, or even organise Openwhyd events to meet local music lovers IRL!

Please contact me by email at adrien @ openwhyd dot org if you would like to know more, and/or if you think that you could help us in any way!

Thanks for your love and loyalty! Never stop jamming! 🤘

Adrien Joly