The Data Spotify Collected On Me Over Ten Years

Sun Jan 18 2026

After using spotify for ten years, I decided to make a GDPR request and retrieve all the data that Spotify had collected on me. I intended to make a light hearted blog post that just visualized some data like a: “Spotify Wrapped but for 10 years”… After looking at the extensive amount of data that Spotify collected on me, I was a bit taken aback and decided to ditch Spotify. Recently it has become a trend to criticize Spotify for their usage of AI music and the low dividends they pay to creators– despite being the most expensive music streaming service on the market. This post is not going to add to those loud noises that are already criticizing Spotify’s business practices. This post, is going to look at Spotify’s extensive data collection and analyze my music listening habits to make an objective cost base analysis on if I would have been better off purchasing music instead of streaming from Spotify.

1 Downloading the Data

Under GDPR law, Spotify is legally obligated to provide you with all the personal data that they have stored on you. When you request your Spotify data, they offer the data export in three segments:

Account Data
Technical Log
Extended Streaming History

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Visualizing Fitbit GPS Data

Sat May 01 2021

This post looks at how you can aggregate and visualize Fitbit GPS data since there is no built-in functionality to do this on the Fitbit website. Before you read this post, check out my two other posts on using Fitbit data:

1 Getting the Data

There are two options that we can use to fetch data from Fitbit:

Fitbit’s Data Export Tool
Fitbit’s API

1.1 Exporting from the Website

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Running a Minecraft Server With Docker

Sun Feb 28 2021

Close your eyes for one moment and imagine that everything you host runs in docker containers. You no longer need to battle system dependencies, and configurations are more manageable; it is now easier to backup and transfer your applications.

In my quest to dockerize everything, I am now dockerizing my Minecraft server. Minecraft is a relatively simple application to host since it is just a single Java application that you need to run. To put this in Docker, we need to declare a Java Docker image that launches our Minecraft server.

FROM openjdk:8u232

WORKDIR /root/minecraft

CMD java -Xmx2048M -jar spigot-1.10.jar -o true

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DIY Video Hosting Server

Mon Feb 15 2021

Two years ago, I created a video streaming server from scratch in Node; looking back, I realized that I must have had way too much free time. I wanted something that I could use to embed videos in websites and aggregate all of my public videos. In the end, I created a lightweight node application with an administration interface, API tokens, and the ability to stream videos. Now, I can embed videos in my blog like this:

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Running Scala Code in Docker

Sat Feb 13 2021

Alrighty, folks, this blog post is pretty straightforward from the title. We are going to be running Scala code in Docker containers. Specifically, we will be using SBT and docker-compose. SBT is a built tool primarily used by Scala developers, and docker-compose is a tool for defining docker environments.

To start, we need to create a simple Docker container that can build our scala code. From an existing Java JDK container, SBT is straightforward to install from a package manager.

FROM openjdk:8u232

ARG SBT_VERSION=1.4.1

# Install sbt
RUN \
  mkdir /working/ && \
  cd /working/ && \
  curl -L -o sbt-$SBT_VERSION.deb https://dl.bintray.com/sbt/debian/sbt-$SBT_VERSION.deb && \
  dpkg -i sbt-$SBT_VERSION.deb && \
  rm sbt-$SBT_VERSION.deb && \
  apt-get update && \
  apt-get install sbt && \
  cd && \
  rm -r /working/ && \
  sbt sbtVersion

RUN mkdir -p /root/build/project
ADD build.sbt /root/build/
ADD ./project/plugins.sbt /root/build/project
RUN cd /root/build && sbt compile

EXPOSE 9000
WORKDIR /root/build

CMD sbt compile run

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