Tag: recommendation engine

Hi Everyone!

I am Shatabarto Bhattacharya (also known as riksucks on IRC and hrik2001 on Github). I am an undergraduate student pursuing Information Technology from UIET, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. This year I participated in Google Summer of Code under MetaBrainz and worked on implementing a feature to send personal recommendation of a track to multiple followers, along with a write up. My mentors for this project were Kartik Ohri (lucifer on IRC) and Nicolas Pelletier (monkey on IRC)

Proposal

For readers, who are not acquainted with ListenBrainz, it is a website where you can integrate multiple listening services and view and manage all your listens at a unified platform. One can not only peruse their own listening habits, but also find other interesting listeners and interact with them. Moreover, one can even interact with their followers (by sending recommendations or pinning recordings). My GSoC proposal pertained to creating one more such interaction with your followers, sending personalized recommendations to your followers.

Community Bonding Period

During the community bonding period, I was finishing up working on implementing feature to hide events in the feed of the user and correcting the response of missing MusicBrainz data API. I had also worked on ListenBrainz earlier (before GSoC), and had worked on small tickets and also had implemented deletion of events from feed and displaying missing MusicBrainz data in ListenBrainz.

Coding Period (Before midterm)

While coding, I realized that the schema and the paradigm of storing data in the user_timeline_event that I had suggested in the proposal won’t be feasible. Hence after discussion with lucifer in the IRC, we decided to store recommendations as JSONB metadata with an array of user IDs representing the recommendees. I had to scratch my brain a bit to polish my SQL skills to craft queries, with help and supervision from lucifer. There was also a time where the codebase for the backend that accepted requests from client had a very poorly written validation system, and pydantic wouldn’t work properly when it came to assignment after a pydantic data-structure had been declared. But after planning the whole thing out, the backend and the SQL code came out eloquent and efficient. The PR for that is here.

{
     "metadata": {
        "track_name": "Natkhat",
        "artist_name": "Seedhe Maut",
        "release_name": "न",
        "recording_mbid": "681a8006-d912-4867-9077-ca29921f5f7f",
        "recording_msid": "124a8006-d904-4823-9355-ca235235537e",
        "users": ["lilriksucks", "lilhrik2001", "hrik2001"],
        "blurb_content": "Try out these new people in Indian Hip-Hop! Yay!"
    }
 }

Example POST request to the server, for personal recommendation.

Coding Period (After midterm)

After the midterm, I started working on creating the modal. At first my aim was to create a dropdown menu for search bar using Bootstrap (as most of the code had bootstrap rather than being coded from scratch). But after a while I consulted with lucifer and monkey and went for coding it from scratch. I had also planned to implement traversing search results using arrow keys, but the feature couldn’t be implemented in due time. Here are screenshots of what was created in this PR.

Accessing menu button for personal recommendation

A modal will appear with a dropdown of usernames to choose for personal recommendation

Modal with usernames chosen and a small note written for recommendation

If one has grokked my proposal, they might already notice that the UI/UX of the coded modal is different from the one proposed. This is because while coding it, I realized that the modal needs to not only look pretty but also go well with the design system. Hence the pills were made blue in color (proposed color was green). While I was finishing up coding the view for seeing recommendations in the feed, I realized that the recommender might want to see the people they had recommended. So, I asked lucifer and monkey, if they would like such feature, and both agreed, hence this UI/UX was born:

Peek into the feed page of recommender

What a recommendee sees

Special thanks to CatQuest and aerozol for their feedbacks over the IRC regarding the UI/UX!

Experience

I am really glad that I got mentorship from lucifer and monkey. Both are people whom I look up to, as they both are people who are not only good at their crafts but are also very good mentors. I really enjoy contributing to ListenBrainz because almost every discussion is a round table discussion. Anyone can chime in and suggest and have very interesting discussions on the IRC. I am very glad that my open source journey started with MetaBrainz and its wholesome community. It is almost every programmer’s dream to work on projects that actually matter. I am so glad that I had the good luck to work on a project that is actually being used by a lot of people and also had the opportunity to work on a large codebase where a lot of people have already contributed. It really made me push my boundaries and made me more confident about being good at open source!