Jukepi

I can honestly say that one way or another and for a variety of reasons, I admire all of my colleagues. There is, for example, my colleague, Steve. Quite apart from the gazillion other jobs he does, he takes care of the invoicing: I do the rest of the financial management (apart from the 80% of it that is done by our accountants). We have a folder for each calendar month and each time Steve sends an invoice out, he prints it off and puts it in the relevant folder.

My responsibility is to do the same with all of the bank and credit card statements, receipts, and invoices. I don't do it as regularly as Steve does and when I say I don't do it as regularly I mean that I went into the office, today - SATURDAY - to bring the folders for the last fifteen months up to date. FML and all that. 

But I had a coffee with me and I put on some music and, actually, it was all all right. I got all the filing done, which was the precursor to filling all of the folders. (I will be back in tomorrow.)

For music in the office, we use our "Jukepi", which is a mini-computer called a Raspberry Pi that you can buy from Amazon for £32 and is about as powerful as a PC I bought in 1995 for 50 times that amount of cash. One of my other colleagues, Paul, wrote some software to run on it, which uses Spotify to create an office Jukebox, which we can all operate from our laptops through a web browser.

You can download the code from here. Paul says: 

JukePi is a web client for the Mopidy music server. Mopidy empowers you to create a custom music server that can connect to Spotify, play local mp3s and more.


In our office, we are using it with a Raspberry Pi as our Jukebox. Once this web client was created, the JukePi was born.


The application is a bespoke application with data models built upon Backbone. Even so, most models contain customisations to retrieve data from a Mopidy connection over Websockets. The websockets requirement is a core part of the Mopidy HTTP API and means that this client will be unable to function with IE9 and below. Special effort will be made to ensure that it functions well in all websockets enabled browsers.


I got as far as the third paragraph, how did you do?

It was nice to be in the office, today, and to have some time to reflect on myself, my colleagues, and what we do. It may be true that, under some circumstances, familiarity breeds contempt but I think more commonly it results in us taking people for granted. On my own here, today, I had an opportunity to remember just how great a team we are. 

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