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Leveraging a Manager Weekly Newsletter for Team Communication

November 25th, 2020 by Esteban Torres

Sometimes keeping your team up to date both weekly and candidly, without adding extra meetings and friction to your workday, is difficult. If only there were a newsletter they could subscribe to to keep updated…

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Testing SQL for BigQuery

October 16th, 2020 by Barbara Scherlein

“To me, legacy code is simply code without tests.” — Michael Feathers

If untested code is legacy code, why aren’t we testing data pipelines or ETLs (extract, transform, load)? In particular, data pipelines built in SQL are rarely tested. However, as software engineers, we know all our code should be tested. So in this post, I’ll describe how we started testing SQL data pipelines at SoundCloud.

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Pagination Updates on Our API

September 21st, 2020 by Rahul Rumalla

As part of our efforts to improve our APIs, we’re introducing updates on how we paginate over tracks. This only affects developers and apps that aren’t strictly relying on the next_href field, but rather custom manipulating the offset to request a page.

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Breaking Loose from Third-Party Lock-In with Custom Refactoring Tools

August 11th, 2020 by Andrés Portillo

Code refactoring is an essential part of the job of software developers. As time goes on, technology evolves, product requirements change, and new features are built into a codebase. Find out how the iOS Collective at SoundCloud created a custom refactoring tool to transform more than 900 source files.

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DeveloperBridge: SoundCloud’s Program for Training People from Diverse Backgrounds to Become Engineers

July 17th, 2020 by Anya Voronova and Janis Bode

DeveloperBridge is a year-long, full-time, paid traineeship program where participants learn from and work with engineering teams at SoundCloud. The DeveloperBridge program was launched in 2017 with the goal of further supporting diversity and inclusion at SoundCloud and giving back to the tech community.

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Changing the Interview Process during Remote Working

June 30th, 2020 by Leela Sharma

At SoundCloud, we changed our hiring strategies to adapt to hiring remotely during COVID-19.

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Technical Interview Reform, Part 2: The Recruiting Perspective and Results

June 26th, 2020 by Anya Voronova

SoundCloud engineers and recruiters recently comprehensively rethought the backend engineering take-home challenge. This is the second in a small series of posts, and it contains the recruiting perspective and the results of the changes.

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Technical Interview Reform, Part 1: Rethinking the Backend Engineering Interview Take-Home Challenge

June 25th, 2020 by Steve Conover

SoundCloud engineers and recruiters recently comprehensively rethought the backend engineering take-home challenge. This is the first in a small series of posts about what we did and why.

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Announcing Twinagle: Twirp and Protobuf for Finagle

June 12th, 2020 by Chris Taylor, Oren Berkowitz and Steve Conover

This article announces the release of Twinagle, an open source implementation of the Twirp protocol for Scala/Finagle.

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Stretch Opportunities for Engineers

May 20th, 2020 by Kristof Adriaenssens

This blog post explains how the Content Team at SoundCloud introduced a process for creating stretch opportunities for its engineers.

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