It started in August 2012 as Indie Composers, a site where local communities could support their local bands. My two hobbies, programming and music, had finally met.
In February 2014 it became NestedBird. The artist hadn't left the nest yet. They weren't signed, and the site was meant for people at that stage, making music and trying to find an audience.
It was PHP on AWS, and I kept at it for years. Band pages arrived, then a gig calendar, audio conversion with ffmpeg and eventually charity pages. There was more to finding a local band than knowing its name. Visitors needed somewhere to hear the music and find out where the band was playing.
By 2016 it had about two thousand commits. One from August 2013 says only “ugh”, which is about as honest as a commit message gets.
It was my first long-running project, though, it wasn't able to build any sort of market-interest. The marketing side was not the domain I was particularly good at. I kept building it anyway. It didn't end in 2016, either. It turned into Sound of Jersey.