Oddball Records
Live & Evolving
Modern platform for the Oddball Records vinyl community at The Boot — events, Spotify playlist integration, and album discovery.
The problem
The club ran its events through spreadsheets and group chat.
How it’s built
A React Router frontend on Netlify, with route loaders and prerendering, and a Spring Boot API in Docker on a self-hosted server.
Decisions
Album details enriched from Discogs.
Route loaders and prerendering.
A separate library for the admin pages.
A caching layer for API responses.
Outcomes
- It replaced the spreadsheets and group chat.
- The club’s owner now saves considerable time managing events.
What Oddball Records says
The Oddball Records website that Nathan built has provided me with a very convenient and easy to use hub. I now have info about upcoming & past events as well as a full archive of what albums have been played all in one place. This has been a big improvement on the old system I used.
A particular favourite feature of mine is the integration of music streaming platforms which allows users to access all of the music and specific playlists created for each event.
Nathan was incredibly quick and effective at fixing any bugs or problems that I was having in the early stages of the site going live and continues to be available though I’ve not needed anything fixed for a while now.
Overall, this has been a great tool for keeping track of and providing easy to access information regarding the Oddball record Club.
What I’d change
Split the libs earlier.