Backstage Blog

• Testing
• Data

“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.

• API
• Announcements

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.

• iOS
• Xcode
• LibTooling
• LLVM
• ast-matchers

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.

• Learning
• Diversity
• Recruiting
• Engineering
• Engineering Culture

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.

• Engineering
• Interviewing
• Remote

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

• Engineering
• Interviewing
• Code Challenge

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.

• Engineering
• Interviewing
• Code Challenge

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.

• Engineering
• Finagle
• Twirp
• Scala
• Open Source
• Announcements

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

• Project Management
• Engineering Management

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

• Intervene
• Web Development
• JavaScript
• Mocking
• API

Open sourcing intervene, a tool to selectively mock API responses and proxy everything else to the real API server.