A previous post on this blog ended with the following paragraph: “We might also replace JSON with a more efficient serialization protocol…

Stretch opportunities are tasks or projects that are a bit beyond your current skill or knowledge level and that allow you to improve and…

Stretch opportunities are tasks or projects that are a bit beyond your current skill or knowledge level and that allow you to improve and…

A little while back, the web team at SoundCloud got an urgent report that our upload page looked weird in the US. Web engineering is based…

A little while back, the web team at SoundCloud got an urgent report that our upload page looked weird in the US. Web engineering is based…

Periskop is an exception monitoring service that we built here at SoundCloud. It was designed with microservice environments in mind, but it…

Periskop is an exception monitoring service that we built here at SoundCloud. It was designed with microservice environments in mind, but it…

The topic of datasets is not new, and they have been successfully used at SoundCloud for analytics purposes for a long time. In this blog…

The topic of datasets is not new, and they have been successfully used at SoundCloud for analytics purposes for a long time. In this blog…

Planet Earth vs. Jupiter. There is the same order of magnitude between the ratio of these two planets and the amount of code that defined…

Planet Earth vs. Jupiter. There is the same order of magnitude between the ratio of these two planets and the amount of code that defined…

My first six months at SoundCloud as an iOS engineer on the Recommendations team have just finished. In that time, I’ve already contributed…

My first six months at SoundCloud as an iOS engineer on the Recommendations team have just finished. In that time, I’ve already contributed…

A large portion of an Android app’s build time can consist of Dagger annotation processing, and most developers agree that productivity is…

A large portion of an Android app’s build time can consist of Dagger annotation processing, and most developers agree that productivity is…

At KotlinConf 2019, I talked about the power of types. In essence, I discussed limiting the number of primitives we use in our code in favor…

At KotlinConf 2019, I talked about the power of types. In essence, I discussed limiting the number of primitives we use in our code in favor…

Last week’s update to the SoundCloud iOS app includes support for Dark Mode. This took several months of work and collaboration between…

Last week’s update to the SoundCloud iOS app includes support for Dark Mode. This took several months of work and collaboration between…

This is part two in a series about solving Gradle remote build cache misses. Solving build cache misses is important to both avoid work that…

This is part two in a series about solving Gradle remote build cache misses. Solving build cache misses is important to both avoid work that…

Until recently, one of the top technical risks facing SoundCloud’s Android team was increasing build times. Our engineering leadership was well aware of the problem, and it was highlighted in our company’s quarterly goals and objectives as modularization. Faster build times means more productive dev...

Until recently, one of the top technical risks facing SoundCloud’s Android team was increasing build times. Our engineering leadership was well aware of the problem, and it was highlighted in our company’s quarterly goals and objectives as modularization. Faster build times means more productive dev...

Media and playback are at the core of SoundCloud’s experience. For that reason, we have established and grown an engineering team that is specialized in providing the best possible streaming experience to our users across multiple platforms. To do this, we combine the industry’s best-fitting solutio...

Media and playback are at the core of SoundCloud’s experience. For that reason, we have established and grown an engineering team that is specialized in providing the best possible streaming experience to our users across multiple platforms. To do this, we combine the industry’s best-fitting solutio...

If there is anything like a silver bullet for creating meaningful and actionable alerts with a high signal-to-noise ratio, it is alerting based on service-level objectives (SLOs). Fulfilling a well-defined SLO is the very definition of meeting your users’ expectations. Conversely, a certain level of...

If there is anything like a silver bullet for creating meaningful and actionable alerts with a high signal-to-noise ratio, it is alerting based on service-level objectives (SLOs). Fulfilling a well-defined SLO is the very definition of meeting your users’ expectations. Conversely, a certain level of...

Maestro is a library we have developed to handle all playback across SoundCloud web applications. It successfully handles tens of millions of plays per day across soundcloud.com, our mobile site, our widget, Chromecast, and our Xbox application. We are considering open sourcing it, and this blog pos...

Maestro is a library we have developed to handle all playback across SoundCloud web applications. It successfully handles tens of millions of plays per day across soundcloud.com, our mobile site, our widget, Chromecast, and our Xbox application. We are considering open sourcing it, and this blog pos...

We’re excited to announce the launch of our public bug bounty program with Bugcrowd — the #1 crowdsourced security platform. This public program is open to Bugcrowd’s full crowd of top, trusted whitehat hackers, and we will award up to $1,500 per vulnerability identified on our website, API, and mob...