How's My Track? (API)

"How's My Track?" is a website built for musicians and music producers to solicit feedback on unfinished tracks. Users submit a request as a Soundcloud URL, and may optionally include information on what they'd like feedback on, or any other context. Once every 24 hours, these requests are assigned to 'groups' of 4. Once assigned to a group, users can listen to the other tracks in their group and leave feedback for their peers. Once a user has written feedback for everyone else in their group, they will be able to see their own feedback. Users can also rate the feedback they receive; users with a higher average rating will be grouped together, incentivising writing constructive, high quality feedback in order to be grouped with other users who write constructive, high quality feedback in future.

The frontend portion of "How's My Track?" can be found here.

Running

This is a pretty standard Django project for the most part. By default, it will run in a development environment on localhost with a sqlite DB. The production environment is configured specifically for Heroku and can be run by setting the ENVIRONMENT environment variable to "PROD".

In any case, the app can be run locally with make dev. This uses Django's runserver command, and therefore should not be used in production.

Tests

Tests with coverage reporting can be run with make test. To run specific tests, use the django test command e.g. python manage.py test path/to/test.

API

Almost the entire API is served from a /graphql endpoint; when running in debug mode, visiting /graphql in a browser allows access to a playground where the user can dick around with queries.

Authentication

JWTs are used for stateless authentication. The django-graphql-jwt package is used for providing tokens, which are set in a HttpOnly JWT cookie.

Scheduled Jobs

A combination of apscheduler and django_apscheduler are used to run three scheduled jobs.

• calculate_user_ratings recalculates the average ratings of all users based on their recent feedback ratings (run at 2:00AM UTC every day)
• send_group_reminder_emails sends emails to all users with unsubmitted feedback responses for groups more than 20 hours old (run at 2:15AM UTC every day)
• assign_groups assigns all unassigned feedback requests to new groups (run at 2:30AM UTC every day)

SMTP/Email

A Sendgrid SMTP is used in production to send emails. For development, emails are 'sent' to a local directory using filebased.EmailBackend.