Case study / Solo product engineer

Bookwave.

A community platform where readers discover and share Spotify playlists built around specific books.

Deployed prototype · Creation & public access verified

The book is the anchor: its detail page connects the title, author, community soundtracks, and the creation entry point. Includes a clearly labeled walkthrough test playlist.

My contribution

Solo product engineer — concept, interface design, implementation, and deployment.

Built with

Next.js 15
TypeScript
Supabase
Spotify API
OpenAI GPT-4o-mini
Vercel

Outcome

Deployed. Registration, sign-in, Spotify track selection, playlist creation, and public playlist access verified in a fresh-account walkthrough. Book search and track rendering still need work.

Visit live product ↗

The context

Bookwave explores a simple idea: readers should be able to create a soundtrack for a particular book and share it with other readers. I owned the concept, visual design, implementation, and deployment. It is a working prototype rather than a finished community platform.

The problem

Readers often build mental soundtracks for books they love, but there's no dedicated place to share or discover those playlists tied to specific titles. Bookwave gives that instinct a home.

The central product decision

A playlist needs to belong to a specific book, and that association needs to remain visible to other readers. The current interface starts creation from a book detail page and carries that book into the soundtrack builder. This gives the creation flow a clear context; making the saved relationship and its public presentation reliable remains the main engineering challenge.

Evidence / Product walkthrough

What the current build demonstrates

01
Account → authenticated session
Created a new test account and signed in successfully.
02
Book → soundtrack builder
Opened an existing book and entered a creation flow with that book already selected.
03
Spotify search → publish
Found a Spotify track, added it, and published a clearly labeled test soundtrack.
04
Publish → public access
Signed out and opened the new playlist URL successfully. Track count and track-table contents did not agree.

A closer look

Tap any image to enlarge and explore the details.

Creation starts with a selected book. Spotify search lets a curator choose tracks before publishing a soundtrack against that book.

The same book-centered entry point on a narrow screen. This is a capture of the deployed prototype, without a device mockup.

Mobile discovery: soundtrack cards keep each book, curator, and track count together. Captured from the live catalog, including the labeled walkthrough test.

Key features

Account registration and password sign-in
Spotify track search and track selection in the soundtrack builder
Publishing a soundtrack linked to a selected book
Public access to the published soundtrack without signing in

Where the prototype still falls short

A fresh-account walkthrough successfully published a book-linked soundtrack with one Spotify track. However, its detail page reported one track while rendering an empty track table. A separate search for The Hobbit returned no results. These observations show that successful creation is not yet proof of a reliable discovery and playback experience. The underlying causes have not been established from a code review.

What I would improve next

Trace how selected tracks are saved and read back; make the published count and track table agree.
Investigate empty book-search results and distinguish a true empty result from an upstream failure.
Verify the complete creation-to-public-view flow before presenting discovery as reliable.
Refine loading, empty, and error states, then test the creation flow on mobile.