Backstage Blog

• Engineering
• JavaScript
• Redux
• React

This post describes why and how we implemented a garbage collector in our Xbox application on top of Redux and in addition to the JavaScript engine’s regular garbage collector.

• Engineering
• iOS
• Architecture

In 2017, our team of six engineers wanted to try out a clean architectural pattern and decided to use VIPER. In the text below, I’ll cover how the team worked on this.

• Engineering
• Microservices

We revisited our distributed tracing setup and incorporated Kubernetes pod metadata into it, significantly enhancing our engineers’ ability to troubleshoot problems that cut across microservices.

• Engineering
• Monitoring
• Testing

At SoundCloud, we follow best practices around continuous delivery, i.e. deploying small incremental changes often (many times a day). In order to improve the user experience, we’ve been exploring different ways of reducing the impact and the Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) of faulty deployments. Enter canary releases.

• Engineering

Nowadays, it’s rather common to encounter Apache Spark being utilized in a lot of companies that need to process huge amounts of data, and things aren’t any different here at SoundCloud — as one can imagine, we have lots of data to process all the time.

• Management
• Engineering

Sometimes, an important team that’s part of an otherwise healthy company culture starts tanking and the people on the team get frustrated and even quit.

In this article, I want to share what I learned when I started to manage a team — referred to as the R Team from here on out — that had huge problems when I took over as Engineering Manager, as well as explain how I got it back on track.

• Retrospective
• Leadership
• Tech Lead
• Engineering

Agile retrospectives are a widely used practice within engineering teams. They provide teams with a way to reflect on how they work and become better at what they do. One of the main benefits of retrospectives is that they empower teams to define and make changes by analyzing what happened in an iteration and by determining what can be improved moving forward. Here at SoundCloud, we hold retrospectives at the end of every iteration (every two weeks), and we often do them at the end of projects as well.