This article was originally published on 01/23/2019
A picture can be worth a thousand words or…a Drake lyric.
All Drizzy fans have been there. You’ve got that perfect selfie or beach photo with your friends that you’ve got to pair with a line from a song on “Take Care” or “So Far Gone” as a caption, but you can’t pinpoint where it came from.
Finding the perfect caption for Instagram posts has become somewhat of an art form and one software engineer wants to make it easier for Drake fans to pair their pictures with lines from his songs.
Kyle Woumn, an engineer for Twilio, combined his coding skills and love for Drake to create Drakestagram after a vacation with friends in Vancouver. Drake and Migos were set to perform in the city during Woumn’s visit, which inspired him to create Drakestagram, a platform that provides search results of keywords in Drake’s lyrics.
Here’s how it works: Users search for a keyword within Drakestagram and the platform returns a list of Drake lyrics that include the term. Vacationers can type “Miami” into the search engine and lyrics like “It’s December 31st and we in Miami just meditating” will show up in the results.
Woumn has been a Drake fan since high school and building the platform became a week-long passion project for him after returning from Vancouver.
The engineer launched Drakestagram on New Years and within two days, the platform had been used for more than 2,400 lyric searches.
Woumn manually pulled Drake’s lyrics from Genius to help populate his platform after using other failed tactics. Shortly after its launch, the number of searches began to overwhelm the platform. Woumn had to revamp his coding and the platform has been updated since.
One of the many issues Woumn ran into while developing Drakestagram were the numerous artists attempting to gain fame off of Drake’s name.
“I noticed that I was getting a lot of false positives while searching Drake songs from upcoming artists who tagged him in their songs,” Woumn said.
Drake is one of the most searched artists on Genius.
Woumn said he plans to develop more platforms for Beyoncé, Jay-Z and other artists with large fan bases, but wants to focus on Drakestagram for now.
