Backstage Blog

• Hacks

Over 3 months ago we started the “Hacker Time” initiative (see here) and now it is time for a recap what’s happened so far. From the outset, people outside of the engineering department were very forthcoming in suggesting ideas for Hacker Time projects. While it was great to see so much interest, the essence of Hacker Time is that engineers create the projects that they’re personally motivated to develop. (It’s absolutely key to keep things separate from the general backlog!). Once that clicked…

• Announcements

Stratus is a jQuery powered SoundCloud player that lives at the bottom (or top) of your website or blog. In version 2, we’ve rebuilt Stratus from the ground up to include many requested features, a nicer aesthetic, and a much easier installation.

Pumped? Yeh, me too. Here’s how to participate in the BETA:

• Announcements

The SoundCloud Developer Community has grown immensely. We have over ten thousand registered applications and over three hundred showcased in our App Gallery. Our goal as the Platform Team is to provide the best API tools possible, while also providing support and inspiration. So far, our primary channels have been this blog, our Twitter account, and our mailing list, hosted on Google Groups.

In the coming months, you can expect some changes as we retool to accommodate the growth of our developer community. We are revisiting everything and doubling down on our efforts to provide the best, most accessible platform possible for building amazing applications that use sound in exciting new ways on the web.

• Announcements
• SDKs

It’s no secret that SoundCloud is a Ruby shop, but that doesn’t stop us from giving some love to the Pythonistas in our community.

Our old Python API wrapper has been neglected. It doesn’t support OAuth 2 or all of the resources made available by our API. It’s old and crufty and we’re sorry for letting it get that way. In order to make it up to you, we wrote a new one and made it much better.

• Agile

SoundCloud started its agile journey with Scrum and eventually moved to an approach based on Kanban (more on that in one of the next blog posts). Regardless of the methodology we follow, though, we strongly believe that the most important tools an agile team can use to practice continuous improvement are retrospectives. You might ask why we consider the retrospective to be the most important one? We think it is key to constantly learn and to improve based on our experiences. The best way to…

• 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.

• Announcements

This is not The Greatest Website in the World, no. This is just a tribute.

I was approached by Tenacious D a week ago with an incredible quest: raising a phallus shaped phoenix onto the internet (oh and the first clip of audio from their new record.) How could I raise this majestic beast with the power of SoundCloud’s legendary API? The answer was simple: Have the sound itself rize the phoenix from its ashes.

• Announcements

Today we’ve added support for our new HTML5 widget to the oEmbed endpoint.

Aside from a brand new user interface with lots of improvements, the HTML5 widget doesn’t require Adobe Flash anymore. That means the widget will load much faster and finally work well on most mobile platforms, including Android & iOS.

And we won’t stop here. We’ll continue to improve the new widget in the coming months.

• Events
• Hacks

Last month we attended Music Hack Day London 2011. A special one, Music Hack Day was born in London 3 years ago and we were happy to attend a hack day again in it’s homeland.

For those who do not know of Music Hack Day, it’s a great weekend-long event aimed at music and sound hackers. Anyone can attend the event for free, and their goal is to conceptualize and develop innovative hacks of either software or hardware.

• 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…