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.

• 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
• Engineering Culture
• Operations

In this post, we share some of the best practices we apply when SoundCloud engineers take on out-of-hours support duties.

• Learning
• Diversity
• Recruiting
• Engineering
• Engineering Culture

DeveloperBridge is a year-long, full-time, paid traineeship program where participants learn from and work with engineering teams at SoundCloud. The DeveloperBridge program was launched in 2017 with the goal of further supporting diversity and inclusion at SoundCloud and giving back to the tech community.

• Engineering
• Engineering Culture

For a successful onboarding, you may rely on things like finding a good mentor or writing up a detailed checklist, but there’s more you can do. In this blog post, a new employee at SoundCloud illustrates a collection of engineering practices here that allowed him to get up to speed efficiently and which made the onboarding experience a positive one.

• Engineering
• Engineering Culture
• Engineering Management

Although it can be easy to know if you’ve messed up badly as a manager, it’s not always as easy to know if you’re doing a good job. In particular, the power dynamics at play can make it hard for people on your team to feel confident letting you know what’s working well and what’s working not so well. In this article, I’m going to talk about an approach I started using in the last few years that seems to strike the best balance of getting the input managers need while still promoting a healthy culture of direct feedback.

• Engineering Culture
• Tech Debt

Almost every company accumulates tech debt as time goes on. Tight deadlines, changing requirements, scaling issues, poor or short-sighted system designs, knowledge silos, inconsistent coding practices, turnover of key staff — these things all happen and can contribute to tech debt. So what can be done about it once it’s there?

• Engineering Culture

An absolutely crucial part of the experience of being an engineer at SoundCloud is learning and growing as a person. Pretty much everyone we hire mentions this aspect as one of their main motivations for joining the company. And while retaining highly talented and motivated people and helping them develop is naturally valuable for SoundCloud as a company, it’s also profoundly beneficial for the employees themselves.