Earlier this year, we updated our API Guide to let developers know that SoundCloud authentication is now operating on the OAuth 2.1 protocol, a popular open standard used by many API providers. This change needed to be made to ensure that we are staying up-to-date in maintaining the highest level of security possible to protect our platform from potential bad actors. As a result, we must ask that our developer community adhere to this new standard as well. We are giving developers who already implemented SoundCloud authorization using OAuth 2.0 a grace period to transition their integrations t ..read more

Large Screen Devices - The New Frontier Recently, the Android team at SoundCloud took on a project to optimize the Android app for large screen devices. With the increasing use of devices like tablets, foldables, and Chromebooks, we decided to provide better support for them. The data showed us users were adopting these devices rapidly. What is more, both Google and Samsung had been vocal about the importance of optimizing for larger screens. Google is even launching a new Playstore for large screen optimized apps only. In this blog post, we’ll go through some of the challenges we faced, the ..read more

We’re working on improving our API offering. In order to do that, a few changes are coming: We need to revoke access for some of you with inactive apps. We’ve reached out directly to those who will be affected via email and we’re working to mitigate impact where we can. We need to do this for two reasons: Recently, we haven’t been able to provide developers with the level of support that you deserve. That includes being able to help you when things go wrong and supporting you when you build amazing things. More pressingly, we haven’t been able to sustain the level of oversight needed to mak ..read more

I recently celebrated my one year anniversary as a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) trainee at SoundCloud. Looking back, I had very little idea of what I was getting into. I studied politics, and had done various teaching and translating jobs over the years before deciding to learn programming. Now I had a coding bootcamp under my belt, but no SRE experience. That said, I was drawn to the idea of troubleshooting complex systems and automating away repetitive tasks. I was also incredibly excited to work at SoundCloud, the world’s largest music and audio platform that lets people discover the ..read more

In an earlier blog post, we talked about how we changed the interview process during remote working as a way of improving our recruiting efforts. In this post, we’ll talk about the training process we defined for the Bar Raiser interview. The Bar Raiser interview is a critical part of the final round of engineering interviews at SoundCloud, and it’s focused on increasing the quality of hiring, which ultimately has an impact on the products we develop for our users. Bar Raiser interviews are well-known in the industry. Amazon popularized the concept of the Bar Raiser role, which is a unique par ..read more

We recently made updates to our SoundCloud iOS and Android apps to address key user experience (UX) fixes according to user feedback. We’ll be updating this blog regularly as we actively work to improve the SoundCloud experience for our users, and we’re so excited to share these improvements with everyone. Here are our most recent updates across iOS and Android as of 4 October 2022. Track Cell Size Reduction (iOS) We made the size of tracks, playlists, artwork, and creators smaller so you can access more music with less scrolling. Labels in the Navigation Tab Bar (iOS) We updated the navigat ..read more

We’ve seen considerable adoption of our internal humane registry, Services Directory, since we sanitized ownership definition and introduced an easier-to-use user interface (UI) to our development infrastructure. Namely, managing backend feature toggles (or as we call them, rollouts) and visualizing interservice dependencies has been helpful in bringing engineering managers, product managers, and engineers closer — not only in their day-to-day work, but also when communicating with other teams in the organization. With higher engagement, we also got feedback and tons of ideas for extending S ..read more

Or, how to raise a project from the dead with tools you probably have lying around at home. Background In a perfect world, every project would flow smoothly — from requirement gathering, to implementation, to acceptance by stakeholders, to launch. Sadly, we don’t live in a perfect world. Sometimes projects hit bumps in the road due to changing business requirements, market conditions, or a host of other factors. This post describes our experiences managing a project that was deprioritized during implementation and lay dormant for an extended period of time before resuming in a different form ..read more

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. A long time has passed since we shared about the challenges of and our approach to real-time stats. Since then, we’ve had to expand our infrastructure to ..read more

SoundCloud has a variety of resource groups, and one such group is called Women in Engineering, or WINE. The mission statement of the group — which is open to people of all genders — is to work “on initiatives to attract and ensure an environment for women to thrive within Engineering at SoundCloud and in the industry.” This is accomplished in a variety of ways — from hosting monthly events like meetings and lunches, to scheduling regular internal knowledge-sharing sessions. And in 2021, one of the group’s initiatives was to support woman and non-binary engineers at the company in writing and ..read more