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, via Agency Leroy
- Stack
- Ruby on Rails, Elasticsearch, Action Cable
Context
I built Music Finland Core in 2015 at Agency Leroy, where over two years I single‑handedly built and ran the processes for 120 websites and e‑commerce stores for Finnish design brands (Iittala, Hackman, Ålandsbanken, Fysios and others). Core was the most substantial of them, and the one that outlasted everything else: it is still running strong today, and I still maintain it.
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 and Elasticsearch on the back end, so faceted search across composers, works and editions 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.
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: dependency and Rails upgrades, search tuning, and the occasional new feature. A decade in, the original architecture has needed evolution, not replacement.