Backstage Blog

• 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
• Interviewing
• Remote

At SoundCloud, we changed our hiring strategies to adapt to hiring remotely during COVID-19.

• Engineering
• Interviewing
• Code Challenge

SoundCloud engineers and recruiters recently comprehensively rethought the backend engineering take-home challenge. This is the second in a small series of posts, and it contains the recruiting perspective and the results of the changes.

• Engineering
• Interviewing
• Code Challenge

SoundCloud engineers and recruiters recently comprehensively rethought the backend engineering take-home challenge. This is the first in a small series of posts about what we did and why.

• Engineering
• Finagle
• Twirp
• Scala
• Open Source
• Announcements

This article announces the release of Twinagle, an open source implementation of the Twirp protocol for Scala/Finagle.

• Engineering
• Go
• Monitoring
• Open Source
• Typescript
• React
• Announcements

A new approach to exception monitoring, designed for high scalability...

• Data
• Engineering
• Architecture

Two years ago, if an engineering team at SoundCloud needed data produced by another team, in many cases, that team would have had to start by building a dataset from the raw data. That meant there was no standard way to structure data into a dataset, there were errors in understanding and interpreting raw data, and there was no reuse of datasets across teams. Ownership of datasets was with the teams consuming data, even when the data itself was owned and best understood by someone else.

By agreeing on an ownership strategy, a common shape for datasets, and standard tooling, SoundCloud was able to streamline these problems away. Now the data and datasets are provided by those who know best about their data, along with the help of tooling built by those who know best about building tools. Read on to learn what datasets look like at SoundCloud and how they are built.

• 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.

• Android
• Dagger
• Performance
• Engineering
• Mobile
• Gradle

A large portion of an Android app’s build time can consist of Dagger annotation processing, and most developers agree that productivity is important, so we decided to experiment to see if we could save time when compiling the SoundCloud Android app. This blog post covers how we used Dagger Reflect to save developer time with minimal changes to our codebase.

• Kotlin
• Engineering
• Types
• KotlinConf

Limiting the number of primitives we use in our code in favor of using custom types instead is an easy win. In this way, we as developers will not only reduce the possibility of bugs by using the compiler, but we will also achieve more readable and self-documented types.