Backstage Blog

• Contests
• Open Source
• Ruby
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The lineup for BaRuCo 2013 looks amazing, with speakers such as Aaron Patterson, Katrina Owen, Sandi Metz, and Ruby’s inventor Yukihiro Matsumoto. The conference is currently SOLD OUT, but we have one extra ticket… and it could be yours!

If you win the ticket, SoundCloud will fly you from anywhere in the world to Barcelona, Spain and put you up in a nice Catalonian hotel.

How do you enter to win?

It’s simple. Just create a command-line interface in Ruby that uses the SoundCloud API. You can use the SoundCloud Ruby SDK, but this is not a requirement. The only…

• Events
• Hacks

The first Music Hack Day — organized by our very own Dave Haynes — was held in July 2009 in London, UK. Since then there have been over 30 Music Hack Day events all over the world in cities like San Francisco, New York, Paris, Barcelona and Reykjavik.

Music Hack Day events gather programmers, designers and artists to conceptualize, build and demo the future of music. Software, hardware, mobile, web, instruments, art — anything goes as long as it’s music related.

I’m happy to announce that SoundCloud is teaming up with Rdio, Unspace and The Echo Nest to organize the first ever Music Hack Day in Toronto. MHD Toronto…

• Events

Late last year, six women crowded in to a Mitte cafe booth and listened to Berlin Geekettes founder Jess Erickson share her idea: Berlin’s first all-women hackathon. With SoundCloud’s Amelie Anglade the then newly-appointed the Berlin Geekettes Tech Ambassador, we agreed that it was a great idea to produce the hackathon as a partnership between the Geekettes and the women developers of SoundCloud.

Fast forward to the first weekend of March, when the vision became reality: after 24 hours of hacking, 80 women demoed 29 projects across a range of different platforms, from a belt transformed into a game controller to an app aimed to help toddlers learn to do everyday tasks.

• Events
• Hacks

Last weekend, we sponsored and attended our first PennApps, the world’s largest student run hackathon held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Nearly 500 students participated from a variety of universities across the US and elsewhere. Students were given 36 hours to get into teams, hack on projects, then show them off to the judges. The results were astounding. In total, over 100 hacks were submitted. Here are some of my personal favourites.

• Events

On Saturday, we hosted Story Hack Boston along with P2PU and Mashery at the MIT Media Lab. About 50 people from content and technical backgrounds joined us to create new story telling experiences. The crowd was pretty evenly split, which made for a lot of awesome collaboration.

• Events
• Hacks

Just over a week ago we had our first internal hackathon at SoundCloud. You can read (and listen!) about it on our community blog or read some of the awesome press coverage the event received.

We had over 60 people attend and over 20 projects were demoed. I joined a team organized by Josh Devins to build ToyBox, a children’s toy that plays sounds from SoundCloud in response to physical events. The team consisted of myself, Horaci Cuevas, Josh Devins, and Oliver Hookins.

The first task was to come up with a design for our project. An Arduino fitted with gyro, accelerometer and motion sensors provided the interface between real world events and the rest of the system. A Raspberry Pi…

• Announcements
• Events
• Hacks

A few weeks ago, I attended News Hack Day in San Francisco. News Hack Days are events that bring together journalists, developers and designers for multi day creative coding and brainstorming sessions.

I really like the idea of hack days that bring together people from different backgrounds. After chatting with a few journalists, it became obvious to me that recording interviews on the phone is a real pain. I saw this as an opportunity to build a fun app that would make this easier for people.

• Events
• Hacks

SoundCloud loves hack days. Our latest hack day adventure brought us to Music Hack Day in Barcelona and we thought we’d share a bit of the great experience we had there.

Photo by Thomas Bonte

• Events

On Saturday, I joined over a hundred other hackers at HackTO. This has become a regular event in the Toronto tech scene, thanks to excellent organizing by Leila Boujnane and Corey Reid. SoundCloud joined several other API providers, including Atomic Reach, Context.IO, FreshBooks, Shopify, TinEye, Twilio, Trendspottr, WordPress and YellowAPI.

The idea behind the event is simple: find a team (or go solo) and build an app using one or more of the APIs presented by sponsors. All apps have to be demoable by 5pm at which time you pitch to the judges who select the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners.

• Events
• Hacks

This past weekend, hundreds of hackers showed up at the TokBox HQ with a mission to build the future of music. The event started with pitches — giving sponsors a chance to show off their APIs — followed by in-depth workshops where attendees could learn more about each platform and ask questions related to their project. Once the hacking time started, people quickly broke off into groups and got to work.