Backstage Blog

• API
• Architecture
• Open Source

This is a story of how we adapted our architecture over time to accomodate growth.

Scaling is a luxury problem and surprisingly has more to do with organization than implementation. For each change we addressed the next order of magnitude of users we needed to support, starting in the thousands and now we’re designing for the hundreds of millions.  We identify our bottlenecks and addressed them as simply as possible by introducing clear integration points in our infrastructure to divide and…

• Go
• Open Source

SoundCloud is a polyglot company, and while we’ve always operated with Ruby on Rails at the top of our stack, we’ve got quite a wide variety of languages represented in our backend. I’d like to describe a bit about how—and why—we use Go, an open-source language that recently hit version 1.

It’s in our company DNA that our engineers are generalists, rather than specialists. We hope that everyone will be at least conversant about every part of our infrastructure. Even more, we encourage engineers…

• Hacks
• Open Source

At SoundCloud we like to invent new ideas. But we’re not adverse to implementing really great tried and tested ideas like the 20% time concept made famous by Google.

We’re calling it Hacker Time. We’re still very much in start-up mode so we’re keen to nurture the spirit of hacking. We’ve been testing out Hacker Time for a few weeks now and we’re excited about its potential, from industry-changing initiatives like “Are we playing yet” to unusual passion projects like the “Owl Octave”.

Why we’re…

• HTML5
• Open Source

We at SoundCloud want to build the best sound player for the web, and we want to do that using the Open Web standards. While working on the native audio features on our mobile site and new widgets, or even as an experiment on the main site, we have discovered that the HTML5 Audio standard is not equally well implemented across all modern browsers and some decisions can be made that would benefit the web audio users and web developers alike. Soundcloud launches the “Are We Playing Yet?” project…