// the find
joshwcomeau/panther
Discover artists through an infinite node graph
Panther is a 2016-era React/Redux side project that lets you explore Spotify's related-artists graph as an animated SVG node graph. It's a showcase piece — joshwcomeau built it to demonstrate complex async animation orchestration with Redux Saga, not to be a production tool.
The graph animation architecture is genuinely thoughtful: splitting the transition into two passes (move first, populate second) to handle async data without blocking the UI is a real solution to a real problem. Using a single SVG with explicit coordinate math instead of fighting CSS transforms for edge animations was the right call. The Redux Saga usage is clean — API orchestration stays in sagas, component logic stays simple. The README explains the hard parts honestly, which is rare for side projects.
Abandoned since 2018, and it depends on RethinkDB (which shut down its commercial operation in 2017 — you'd need to self-host) and Spotify's related-artists API endpoint (deprecated in 2024, so the core feature is dead). The live site is gone. There are no tests for the most interesting parts — the graph state transitions — only reducer and action tests. This is a historical curiosity at this point, not something you can actually run.