Music-Broadcast Platform Modernization

The platform's stations and desktop players speak a legacy control protocol that could not change. The new JSON API was built beside it with full feature parity — station status, playback queue, playlists, weekly and yearly scheduling, command lifecycle, and event feeds — so mobile clients gained first-class control without touching the backend the stations still use. Authentication moved to station-scoped JWT with credentials taken out of URL parameters into a secure request body, and every phase was validated against a production-equivalent database before release.

The API ships with a versioned, importable collection (v1 → v2 → v3) so the client's team and integrators always have accurate, runnable documentation — a deliberate deliverable, not an afterthought, because an API that only its author can call is not finished.

Every part of the engagement is built in an AI-native development environment: AI accelerates design, implementation and analysis, and a human reviews, refines and signs off at every meaningful gate — design, security, and go-live. High-risk changes such as authentication, device-control protocols, and production schema are explicitly gated behind human sign-off; nothing ships to production unsupervised. Secrets stay out of source control and infrastructure is provisioned only from official, verified sources. This is what makes it possible to move fast on a live, legacy-critical system without breaking it.

The platform's mobile apps are being redesigned from the ground up — from a dark, tab-limited legacy UI to a modern, artwork-rich experience built from a shared Figma design system. iOS is native SwiftUI and Android native Kotlin, both driven by a single design-token system mirrored one-to-one across platforms so the two apps stay consistent with the design and with each other. The redesigned foundation — design tokens, navigation shell, a persistent mini-player, re-skinned entry screens — has landed on both platforms, wrapped around the existing proven functionality so nothing regresses during the transition. The redesigned content screens are in build.

The platform's usage analytics historically depended on a third-party SaaS. Its replacement — currently in the architecture and infrastructure phase, presented as design work rather than a shipped product — is a self-hosted analytics stack the client fully owns: action logs flowing into a self-managed TimescaleDB store chosen for high-volume append-heavy event data, isolated from the operational database so heavy reporting never competes with day-to-day operations, and surfaced through dashboards inside the admin panel the team already uses. The reports are the ones operators actually ask for: most-played playlists, song removals and trends, most-skipped tracks, manual-versus-scheduled overrides, player uptime, and content-update monitoring — with no per-seat SaaS pricing and full data ownership.