2025.03.23 aka Vinyl Tap

It’s been a fun, productive weekend — here’s a quick rundown of what I’ve been working on and learning.

Bmore Today: Launch + Feedback

On Friday, I officially launched Bmore Today on Bluesky and Reddit.

I was a little worried at first because posts can easily get buried on Reddit bu fortunately, it gained a bit of traction! The community seemed to receive it well and even recommended additional news sources. I’ve already integrated one, and I’m committed to maintaining the app so it can keep serving folks in Baltimore.

Vinyl + Spotify

A really cool Youtube channel I like released a video on Thursday doing "goofy" UI implementations (goofy in quotes because some of them are just straight up cool). One of those was kind of a skeumorphic Spotify implementation, having playlists/albums be represented by vinyls that you drag to a turntable:

The idea resonated with a lot of people (myself included). Which, as an aside, YouTube is TERRIBLE for organizing off platform. Juxtopposed's channel naturally attracts a mix of UI/UX folk and developers. So, when people expressed interest in bringing this idea to life, I quickly realized any comment with a social media handle was getting deleted. Had to dance around it, but I found someone through Bluesky and we started a repo on it. I've been aiming for reaching parity with the video and here's what we have so far.

I'm excited to see how this progresses, especially integrating Spotify Playback in a React Native project. But so far, it's been fun and I've learned a lot on using ReAnimated and Gesture Handler.

Bonus: Local Startup Chat

I had a great meeting with a local startup. Can’t say too much yet — but I’m really excited about where it might go.