dogg number by Mel N. '24, MEng '25

In 2022, Snoop Dogg changed the course of human history by releasing his song “Affirmations”. Today, we honor him by calculating every Spotify artist’s “Dogg Number”.

That’s the header for our HackMIT project on the submission website.

“Affirmations” has been a running joke among my friends for the past year, mostly because when I found it, I was like…Snoop Dogg???? Nursery rhyme??? But leaning into the song and repeating the affirmations does kind of help. I’ve had many a night where I’m hunched over my computer trying to finish my work as I mumble, sounding half-dead, “I get better every single day…”

My roommates and I decided to join HackMIT⁠01 an annual hackathon hosted at mit where you try to code a project in 24 hours this year just to see what it was like. It was advertised pretty strongly to freshmen, which was why Sarah participated that year, but Rui and I had just never signed up before. We thought we’d try it out before we graduated.

Every year, the very talented HackMIT team designs merch for attendees. This year, hackers got a dark green hoodie (which I was super happy about, because I’ve really been in a green-brown-white aesthetic shift lately), some cute stickers, a bingo postcard, and a fridge magnet.

We checked in, collected our items, got breakfast, sat through the opening ceremony, and decided that we were not going to code in Johnson Ice Rink surrounded by a million other people, so we went to Rotch Library, the architecture library in Lobby 7.⁠02 the building where the little dome is

I’d actually never been before, as a frequenter of Hayden and Barker,⁠03 the other libraries on campus -- barker is mostly a quiet study space but has a great view under the big dome, and hayden was recently renovated & people can hang out/talk there and I thought it was super nice. There was pretty much no one there since it was a Saturday morning. We started setting up — we wanted to work on a Bacon number-esque project where we calculated how many collaborations away Spotify artists were from Snoop Dogg, so we were using the Spotify API and the Spotipy library. We also wanted to visualize our networks using Pyvis. Rui and Sarah taught me how to use Github, which I’d always been so confused by in previous UROPs.

But we eventually discovered that it was quiet study hours, so we left and found ourselves in a random classroom in Building 4, trying to figure out what the heck was going on with the Spotify API. It got to a point where, in a moment of despair, I got up and wrote “CODING IS HARD!!!!!” in big letters over the thermodynamics scribbles on the board left from a previous lecture.

Since we’re all living together, being part of the same team became a lot easier, since we could just…go home and finish the rest of the project in our pajamas. We were done around 1 AM, and we submitted it to Devpost, the platform that HackMIT was using for submissions.

(We didn’t submit it for judging, because we were all very tired and didn’t feel like doing a presentation, and also it requires some wrangling to run it on your computer, but woohoo! First real coding project out there! Honestly, I’m super proud of us for coming up with this in like, a little over 12 hours.)

We slept in and ordered waffles from Zinneken’s the next day to celebrate.

our input page. it was my first time working with css (outside of, like, designing post templates on old pokemon forums), which was neat :]

pyvis visualization. it has physics (you can drag the nodes around)! rui worked SO hard on that back button