Backstage Blog

• GitHub
• Knowledge Sharing
• Engineering Culture

Empty pull request descriptions slow down teams, but PR templates are a quick and easy remedy. By streamlining the PR writing process into a series of fill-in-the-blank steps, a PR becomes a valuable asset for knowledge sharing across teams that will outlive its authors.

• Engineering
• Go
• Scala

This is the story of how I joined SoundCloud and learned Scala as a Golang developer with no prior knowledge of Scala.

• Engineering
• Architecture
• BFF
• Microservices

This is the story of how we used the Strangler pattern to migrate our public API from a monolithic codebase to a fully fledged BFF over the course of eight years. It also discusses some of the trials and tribulations we encountered along the way.

• Engineering
• Go
• Python
• Scala
• Ruby
• Monitoring
• Open Source

We made some updates to Periskop, our internal pull-based exception monitoring service. To learn about what is new in 2022, read on.

• Engineering
• Humane Registry
• DevXP
• Tooling
• Automation

Imagine yourself as an engineer who just joined SoundCloud. Besides meeting your colleagues and getting your new laptop, badge, and that cool branded hoodie, the first weeks at work will be about exploration. Onboarding involves a lot of “looking around”: finding mentorship, getting to know the company’s culture, and exploring codebases — and most likely, you’ll want to contribute code too!

The first question you might ask is “What do I even work on?”. With time, you’ll identify a few sibling…

• Engineering
• Apache-Kafka
• Event-Streaming
• Architecture

Discover the powerful design of Apache Kafka and how SoundCloud consumes events from Kafka.

• Engineering
• API
• Architecture
• Microservices
• Productivity

Discover how SoundCloud extended the concept of Value-Added Services to Domain Gateways.

• Engineering
• API
• Architecture
• Microservices
• Productivity

Learn about the evolution of architectural patterns at SoundCloud — from BFFs to Value-Added Services.

• Engineering
• API
• Architecture
• Microservices
• Productivity

Discover how service architecture has evolved at Soundcloud over the past few years...

• Knowledge Sharing
• Remote Work
• Web
• Collective

There’s no single platform team that consists of only web engineers at SoundCloud, even though we consider ourselves to be part of the “Web Collective.” Instead, all web engineers are split into smaller, cross-functional teams across the organization. This structure definitely has its advantages, but it’s also left engineers in a situation where platform-specific experience and knowledge about platform-specific best practices are more difficult to access than they would be if we were all on the…