Backstage Blog

• Engineering Culture
• Learning
• Knowledge Sharing

In this post, I'll share my experiences as a new SRE, reflecting on the lessons I’ve learned and challenges I’ve faced in my first year. I hope to give you an insight into the role of an SRE, and perhaps even inspire others to consider a career in this field.

• Updates
• App
• iOS
• Android

We recently made updates to our SoundCloud iOS and Android apps to address key user experience (UX) fixes according to user feedback. Read on to find out more.

• Engineering
• Interviewing

The Bar Raiser interview is a critical part of the final round of engineering interviews at SoundCloud, and it’s focused on increasing the quality of hiring, which ultimately has an impact on the products we develop for our users. In this post, we’ll talk about the training process we defined for the Bar Raiser interview.

• Updates
• App
• iOS
• Android

We recently made updates to our SoundCloud iOS and Android apps to address key user experience (UX) fixes according to user feedback. Read on to find out more.

• Android
• Images
• Picasso

The SoundCloud Android app recently got a significant makeover: a “new year, new me” type of thing. Our remarkable design team and outstanding engineers worked together to revamp the way we display all kinds of images in the app, and I’m about to take you behind the scenes on this “glow-up” journey.

• Engineering
• Humane Registry
• DevXP
• Tooling
• Automation
• Backstage

In this post, we'll describe how we took our service catalog to the next level, how we migrated our internal system to the open source Backstage developer portal technology, and how we're now providing more capabilities and empowering our engineering team, in turn speeding up software delivery and engineering effectiveness.

• WINE
• Engineering
• Workshops
• DEI

SoundCloud has a variety of resource groups, and one such group is called Women in Engineering, or WINE. The mission statement of the group — which is open to people of all genders — is to work “on initiatives to attract and ensure an environment for women to thrive within Engineering at SoundCloud and in the industry.”

• GitHub
• Knowledge Sharing
• Engineering Culture

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.

• Engineering
• Go
• Scala

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

• Engineering
• Architecture
• BFF
• Microservices

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.