Random FM started as a personal project, I wanted an easy way to discover music from around the world instead of scrolling through the same playlists. I built it end-to-end: designed the UI, wired it to the Radio Browser API for station data, and used Postgres (via Neon) with Prisma to let users save favorite stations across sessions, with Clerk handling auth so favorites persist per user.
The Radio Browser API isn't always reliable, some stations return slow or fail entirely, and there's no guaranteed uptime. Early on this meant users would hit blank screens or long silent waits. I fixed it by adding several toast notifications instead of blank states, which kept the app feeling responsive even when the underlying data source wasn't.