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PR Templates for Effective Pull Requests

July 12th, 2022 by Sarah Port

Empty pull request descriptions slow down teams, but PR templates are a quick and easy remedy. By streamlining the PR writing process into a series of fill-in-the-blank steps, a PR becomes a valuable asset for knowledge sharing across teams that will outlive its authors.

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Learning Scala at SoundCloud

April 19th, 2022 by Bhuvaneshwari Chinnadurai

This is the story of how I joined SoundCloud and learned Scala as a Golang developer with no prior knowledge of Scala.

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The End of the Public API Strangler

March 14th, 2022 by Dónal O'Brien and Jorge Creixell

This is the story of how we used the Strangler pattern to migrate our public API from a monolithic codebase to a fully fledged BFF over the course of eight years. It also discusses some of the trials and tribulations we encountered along the way.

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What Is New with Periskop in 2022

February 1st, 2022 by Marc Tuduri

We made some updates to Periskop, our internal pull-based exception monitoring service. To learn about what is new in 2022, read on.

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Obvious Ownership: A Sensible Humane Registry

January 6th, 2022 by Julio Zynger

Imagine yourself as an engineer who just joined SoundCloud. Besides meeting your colleagues and getting your new laptop, badge, and that cool branded hoodie, the first weeks at work will be about exploration. Onboarding involves a lot of “looking around”: finding mentorship, getting to know the company’s culture, and exploring codebases — and most likely, you’ll want to contribute code too!

The first question you might ask is “What do I even work on?”. With time, you’ll identify a few sibling…

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Tiny Letter from Kafka

October 13th, 2021 by Kaylee Cho

Discover the powerful design of Apache Kafka and how SoundCloud consumes events from Kafka.

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Service Architecture at SoundCloud — Part 3: Domain Gateways

September 17th, 2021 by Marc Tuduri, Kim Covaci, Bernd Louis and Jorge Creixell

Discover how SoundCloud extended the concept of Value-Added Services to Domain Gateways.

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Service Architecture at SoundCloud — Part 2: Value-Added Services

August 20th, 2021 by Bejal Lewis and Marc Tuduri

Learn about the evolution of architectural patterns at SoundCloud — from BFFs to Value-Added Services.

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Service Architecture at SoundCloud — Part 1: Backends for Frontends

July 29th, 2021 by Jorge Creixell

Discover how service architecture has evolved at Soundcloud over the past few years...

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How We Share Knowledge as a Web Collective

July 14th, 2021 by Can Göktas and Jan Monschke

Group of people sharing knowledge

There’s no single platform team that consists of only web engineers at SoundCloud, even though we consider ourselves to be part of the “Web Collective.” Instead, all web engineers are split into smaller, cross-functional teams across the organization. This structure definitely has its advantages, but it’s also left engineers in a situation where platform-specific experience and knowledge about platform-specific best practices are more difficult to access than they would be if we were all on the…

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