Backstage Blog

• Retrospective
• Leadership
• Tech Lead
• Engineering

Agile retrospectives are a widely used practice within engineering teams. They provide teams with a way to reflect on how they work and become better at what they do. One of the main benefits of retrospectives is that they empower teams to define and make changes by analyzing what happened in an iteration and by determining what can be improved moving forward. Here at SoundCloud, we hold retrospectives at the end of every iteration (every two weeks), and we often do them at the end of projects as well.

• Project Management

Or, how to raise a project from the dead with tools you probably have lying around at home.

• Engineering Culture

An absolutely crucial part of the experience of being an engineer at SoundCloud is learning and growing as a person. Pretty much everyone we hire mentions this aspect as one of their main motivations for joining the company. And while retaining highly talented and motivated people and helping them develop is naturally valuable for SoundCloud as a company, it’s also profoundly beneficial for the employees themselves.

• Architecture
• Data

Track play counts are essential for providing a good creator experience on the SoundCloud platform. They not only help creators keep track of their most popular songs, but they also give creators a better understanding of their fanbase and global impact. This post is a continuation of an earlier post that discussed what we do at SoundCloud to ensure creators get their play stats (along with their other stats), both reliably and in real time.

• Android
• Mobile
• Testing
• Firebase

Testing mobile applications is not always an easy feat. In addition to defining what to test and determining how to write those tests, actually running tests can also be problematic — in particular, UI test suites running on real mobile devices or emulators sometimes run for an extensive amount of time.

• Project Management
• Engineering Management

One challenge engineering teams often face is dealing with work that doesn’t revolve around developing new features but that still requires the team’s attention and time. The Content Engineering Team here at SoundCloud is no exception, so we iterated on a process to deal with unplanned and support tasks to end up with fewer interruptions and more time to spend on implementing planned features.

• iOS
• Testing
• Mobile

Apple introduced automated UI testing in Xcode 7. This was a great addition for developers because this native support promised, among other things, an improvement in the flakiness notoriously associated with automation tests. As many of us developers have experienced, tests can sometimes fail even when there has been no modification to the test or underlying feature code.

• Search
• Data Science
• Machine Learning
• Analytics
• Data

SoundCloud consists of hundreds of millions of tracks, people, albums, and playlists, and navigating this vast collection of music and personalities poses a large challenge, particularly with so many covers, remixes, and original works all in one place.

• Learning
• Diversity
• Recruiting

Back in 2016, the SoundCloud People Team collaborated with engineering management in an effort to bring more junior engineers into the company. The result was DeveloperBridge, a paid junior engineering program that ran for 12 months and was based out of our Berlin headquarters.

• Architecture
• Microservices

A little less than two years ago, SoundCloud began the journey of replacing our homegrown deployment platform, Bazooka, with Kubernetes. Kubernetes automates deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.