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Case study

Music Finland Core

Built in 2015 and still running strong: 100,000+ records on Finnish music, searchable in one place. I still maintain it.

Year
2015
Role
Full‑stack development, 2015 to today
Client
Music Finland
Stack
Ruby on Rails, Algolia, Action Cable

Context

I built Music Finland Core in 2015. It is still running strong today, and I still maintain it.

Music Finland Core homepage: a full-bleed photo of a harpist behind the headline “Your resource in Finnish music.”, the subline “Composer profiles · Sheet music · Audio samples · Web shop”, a search field with an advanced search link, then a grid of composer portraits with work counts and a Latest works section
Your resource in Finnish music, as it looks today: composer profiles, sheet music, audio samples and a web shop behind one search box. The hero photography rotates between instruments.

What it is

Music Finland promotes Finnish music abroad, and Core is its catalogue: composer profiles, works, sheet music, audio samples and a web shop, all reachable from one search field. Under the hood it manages, searches and filters more than 100,000 records.

Build

  • Rails on the back end, with faceted search across composers, works and editions on Algolia (originally Elasticsearch), so search stays fast at that scale.
  • A single‑page end‑user interface on the front, with search and advanced filtering as the primary navigation.
  • Realtime administration over Action Cable, so editors see catalogue changes without reloading.
The Music Finland admin: editing a work, with composer, title, duration and year fields, a quick navigation sidebar and a blue main menu
The admin behind it: ActiveAdmin, customised until it stopped looking like ActiveAdmin. Works, composers, products and orders are edited here.

Still running, still maintained

Most agency projects are replaced within a few years. Core has been in continuous production since 2015, serving Music Finland’s catalogue to publishers, performers and researchers, and I have kept maintaining it ever since: Rails and dependency upgrades, moving search from Elasticsearch to Algolia, and the occasional new feature. A decade in, the original architecture has needed evolution, not replacement.

Visit the project ↗