Luke Oming Project

While I was still studying for my undergraduate degree in college, there was a span of a few years in between services like Napster/Limewire and Soundcloud/Spotify existed, where it was very difficult to download and stream music. My rooommate had just launched SyllabusCentral, and my being was overloaded with problem solving, business, financial, and technological thinking. I needed something fun and creative to work on. I've always been very passionate about music. I used to write and discuss poetry in online forums growing up. I really had no music bias, every piece of music sounds inherently magical to me. Sound is literally everywhere. I hear music taking walks in nature.

I really wanted to put my Ruby skills to use, I was all about programming in Ruby at the time. So I designed and developed a daily-news style Ruby on Rails application dedicated to music/artist downloads, streaming, news, promotion, and reviews. I didn't have a name for the platform, so I scrambled my name up to form LukeOming, my music alter-ego. I'm pretty shy about my projects, I try to be humble, so I didn't really tell anyone who Luke Oming was. I used up all of my school's allocated printing money to print 1000's of flyers for the platform. I walked around different areas with friends at night sort of guerilla-marketing. dropping flyers anywhere they could catch a view. Over the next week, I would see people using the platform in class. I'd hear whispers about who Luke Oming might be from friends. All of the sudden I was hitting over 1,000 unique visitors per day. I ended up having my friend Jeremy help with creating content we enjoyed because it got to be way too much for me to handle while studying and exploring life in school. It was a lot of fun until Spotify came along, and my passions shifted elsewhere. It was also a good opportunity to introduce Jeremy to development life, something he still practices today (he's a math genius).

I essentially identified characteristics of Web 2.0 applications and applied them in a business context. I managed full service our SEO, SEM, and internet marketing strategies. I architected, designed, and developed the entire platform by myself in my free time. I introduced a pretty creative approach incorporating social media optimization to augment traditional SEO offerings already in place. And leveraged analytic tools to automate and streamline SEO related activities to increase traffic and provide more value. I utilized google analytics and keyword search tools, worked with sitemap pages for indexing, and created SEO-friendly URLs. At the time, this required a constant understanding of Google’s rapid change in algorithms. We eventually built a database of over 10,000 users.

Tech Stack: Ruby on Rails, AWS, Amazon S3, MySQL, JavaScript, jQuery, SEO, SEM, Google Anlytics, Writing, Marketing, Management, UX/UI Design, Logo Design, Branding