Following a bit of a break from programming, I have finally got around to starting a new project on my website. It took me quite some time to decide on the right project to undertake. This was down to my struggle striking the right balance between learning and interesting. Having decided to learn more about APIs, I began to look at what apps I use on a daily basis. For those of you who are wondering, an API is basically a way to access the data and features of another app or service. An API functions in the same way a waiter does at a restaurant, communicating your order to the kitchen and hopefully returning the meal that you ordered when it is ready. Put simply, I wanted to learn how to access data in another app or service using an API and visualize the data the API returned.

When I began, I initially chose to try and access the Strava API to visualise my running data. Unfortunately, Strava has severely restricted the use of their API in recent months and I was unable to get the quantity of information to tell an interesting story. Thus, my attention turned towards another app that I use daily, Spotify. I chose to use the Spotify API for this project as I was interested to see if I could recreate some of the end-of-year statistics that Spotify produces for their users.

Instead of boring everyone to death with insights into my questionable musical tastes, I wanted to push the boundaries out a little bit and allow each of you to see your own Spotify data. The Spotify Top 50 Average data in the graphs below was taken from this Kaggle dataset. The user data is taken from a variety of different endpoints, including your 'Top Songs of ____' playlists. More information on the full capabilities of the Spotify Web API is available here.