Build "Hello world" site using Django

My smartest friend had told me about jQuery and Django some years prior. I realise now that "some years prior" is a big deal when choosing a tech stack – new frameworks advance quickly.

Well, I googled jQuery and Django, and it was easy to create a site and put it on the internet! I was rather delighted with myself. It even had a database and all. So we were ready to rock!

I cannot stress how arbitrary that first decision was, to use Django and jQuery. I spent approximately zero minutes weighing up different tech stacks. I had dabbled in python before, so Django seemed like a decent first thing to try. And it worked. So years followed, slowly developing a powerful app in Django, with full-page reloads for the most part – without any decision up front about what tech stack might make sense.

There's a saying in Irish, "Tús maith, leath na hoibre", which means "A good start is half the work". I guess I was in no mood for theoretical pros/cons of tech, I didn't care at all about the underlying tech and knew the listeners wouldn't either. I also felt EVERYTHING I do is just temporary and will be re-built really soon, so I only cared about getting SOMETHING online, to get feedback on different ideas, as soon as possible.

I had a whoooole bunch ideas around audio – in particular the social elements of sharing and discovery – and I made a landing page, with some mockups of what I had in mind.

The best .com I had at the time was awedify.com. I see the Wayback Machine didn't crawl my site in 2014 (probably because nobody knew about it), but there is a record of it a few months later, when it was still online on the new .com:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150328132259/https://awesound.com/demo/quote

My obsession initially was from the listener side: sharing quotes, saving bookmarks, discovering what podcasts your friends are subscribed to, and in particular: blurring the line between a formal "podcast" and a casual "voicemail". Ideally, blurring the line between having to choose to "listen live" or "listen to a pre-recorded podcast".
Obviously a pre-recorded podcast can be listened to at 1.5x speed, and live cannot… but I liked the idea of a single "feed" with a mixture of audio for your ears only (e.g., a voicemail from a friend, or an article you'd saved read out by text-to-speech generator) mixed in with "broadcast" audio like live radio (which you can of course pause if you need to) and podcasts (totally pre-recorded).

If it's 12:05, I should be able to turn on a show that started 5 minutes ago, listen at 1.5x speed until I catch up with "real-time", and continue listening live.
If I get out of my car, I should be able to pause the live radio, and resume where I left off when I get back into my car.
[This is how live videos on YouTube work: you can join a live broadcast late, and rewind, and play at 2x speed until you catch up with live. You can pause as you need.]
Having to decide "Do I want to listen to this live, or do I want to wait for the podcast to be available" seemed so antiquated.

I had probably 100 ideas at this time. I didn't fully appreciate that that coming up with ideas is easy; building is hard.

I noted some of the ideas on the landing page, stuck a "beta" sticker on it so it would be obvious you ain't seen nothin' yet, and invited folks to leave an email (or email for info?). Come to think of it, I think I didn't even have a proper email capture form set up.

The website was probably seen by nobody, and I'm not even sure why I started by building out landing pages… I may have been the only one to see the website, but if I was the target audience, the website worked: it was enough to convince me that I was onto something, and I should quit my job and make this a reality.