Register for Spotify’s roadmap webinar on April 30, 2024 — and see what’s coming next from Spotify for Backstage, the open source platform for building internal developer portals. We’ll show you our latest developer tools, including a sneak peek at new Spotify Plugins for Backstage and a first-look at Spotify Portal for Backstage — a full-featured developer portal that is quick and easy for any engineering org to adopt. See demos from Spotify’s team and learn how to apply for the private beta...

Host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky talks with Kyle Buttner, a product manager on Spotify’s insights team, to discuss Spotify's journey in measuring developer productivity — from how we evaluate different frameworks (like DORA and SPACE) to what kind of data we collect, to the role Backstage plays in unifying our development practices. Can productivity metrics really draw an accurate picture of your engineering org and show you the way to happier and more productive developers? Learn...

How did we learn to do event delivery at scale at Spotify? It’s been a journey. When you do something like tap the play button in the Spotify app, that’s an event. And getting that event data is fundamental to the Spotify experience. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to make music recommendations, pay artists fairly, or track down pesky, hard-to-find bugs. At the most basic level, this seems like a straightforward process: record an event, send that event data to a server somewhere, do...

We’ve seen generative AI and large language models do some amazing things in the past year — but how do you go from a tech demo to a real shipping product? In this Release Notes episode of the NerdOut@Spotify podcast, we’ll hear about what it took to ship our Voice Translation pilot, which takes podcasts recorded in English and uses AI to generate the original podcaster’s voice speaking in Spanish (with German and French coming next). Host Dave Zolotusky talks with senior machine learning...

Over the summer, Spotify helped Tesla engineers ship a major update to their built-in media player. In this Release Notes episode, host Dave Zolotusky talks with Spotify engineering manager Geetika Arora and senior product designer JC Chhim about collaborating with Tesla to improve the in-car listening experience, the value of having a familiar user experience across devices, and how there’s more to a great collaboration than just picking the right SDK for the job. Introducing Release Notes...

How do you get a machine to find a song that’s similar to another song? What properties of the song should it look for? And then does it just compare each track to every other track, one by one, until it finds the closest match? When you have a catalog of 100 million different music tracks, like we do at Spotify, that would take a long time. So, for these kinds of problems, we use a technique known as nearest neighbor search (NNS). This past summer at Spotify, we built a new library for...

In the very old days, if you needed more storage for your database, you had to walk into the data center and install another server. Now you can just log into your cloud provider’s console and click a few buttons. Voilá, more storage. So easy! But what if you’re replicating that storage configuration for hundreds of databases at once? Suddenly, that’s a lot more clicking. Not so easy! (Plus, very tedious and very error prone.) So instead of living with this “ClickOps” approach, we developed a...

Last episode, we talked about ABBA, our first A/B testing tool. We used it to test UI changes, new features, content recommendations — anything and everything we could think of. ABBA was so good and worked so well for so long…that we decided to get rid of it. Years of using ABBA taught us what makes for good experimentation, and we eventually realized we needed a better tool, built from scratch. Listen to find out why we pulled the plug on ABBA and how Spotify’s Experimentation Platform was...

Back in the day, Spotify built a custom A/B testing tool called ABBA. It was great. The platform enabled lots of teams to try out lots of ideas for new features to see what worked and what didn’t. With ABBA, we went from doing tens of experiments to hundreds of experiments. But we didn’t just learn what color button users liked better: the more tests we ran, the more we learned about our testing methods, including the limitations of ABBA itself — which eventually led us to a new, better way...

We’re often focused on features that improve the experience for users — letting them do something better, faster, smarter. But if you don’t consider accessibility issues, many users won’t be able to use the feature at all. From color contrast and text size to alt text for enabling screen readers and voice commands, accessibility issues can affect everyone, whether you have a permanent disability or just an armful of groceries. So how do you get developers and designers to adopt an...

How do you make an AI-generated voice feel more like a real person? You give it a real personality. Spotify recently released a new feature in the US and Canada called DJ. Turn it on, and you hear a curated selection of music and recommendations, along with a fun, friendly, knowledgeable voice telling you more about what you’re listening to (you know, like a real DJ) — except everything you hear is personalized just for you. Learn what makes this DJ feel so realistic and meet the people...

What happens when the standard tooling for iOS and Android just doesn't cut it anymore? What’s it like to maintain an app when there are literally thousands of commits every week? How do you develop your feature without worrying about everybody else’s feature, when at the end of the day, you’re shipping a single, massive app? In other words, what’s it really like to build apps at Spotify’s scale? Host Dave Zolotusky talks with Patrick Balestra, a staff engineer on our client platform team,...

Whether you’re working at a major financial institution or an audio streaming platform, it turns out engineering teams face a lot of the same challenges to doing their jobs effectively. In this episode, you’ll hear Spotify’s head of technology and platforms, Tyson Singer, discuss developer experience with engineering leaders from Expedia Group, Bank of the West, consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, and digital telecom TELUS — all adopters of Backstage, our open platform for building developer...

There are thousands of developers building great Spotify experiences — who don’t actually work at Spotify. From smart speakers to game consoles to car infotainment systems, how do we support this diverse, creative community building on top of the Spotify platform? Along with providing APIs, SDKs, and other developer tools, it starts with something even more fundamental: listening to and understanding their needs. That’s where our developer advocates come in. Host Dave Zolotusky talks with...

From Norway to Nebraska, there are individual developers keeping the open source projects that we all depend on going. Last year, Spotify started an annual fund to help support maintainers of free and open source software (FOSS) — the Spotify FOSS Fund. We earmarked 100,000 Euros and then gave it away to nine projects, no strings attached. One of those recipients was Byte Buddy, a project with millions of users, but just one volunteer maintainer — its creator, Rafael Winterhalter. Hear what...

Recorded live at midnight EST, December 6, 2022, from Boston, Gothenburg, and Stockholm, via the Spotify Live app. In this special Advent of Code episode, we try to solve the Day 6 puzzle the moment it’s released. Host Dave Zolotusky and Spotify’s chief architect, Niklas Gustavsson (aka, ngn), play against Spotify’s reigning champ, the one and only, unstoppable Jimmy Mårdell. Entering today’s challenge behind ngn in the standings, will Jimmy reclaim his rightful place atop the Spotify...

Instead of performing 10 big software upgrades to our infrastructure every year, what if we did 10,000 small ones, in all our repos, all at once? That’s the idea behind Fleet Management: using automation to take away some of the everyday toil of being a developer, freeing our teams to focus on more interesting problems than migrating to the next version of a low-level software dependency. But for automation at this scale to succeed, our developers would have to be willing to give up some...

If you look at any of our open source projects, you’re bound to see the phrase “Made with 💚 at Spotify.” That’s because many open source projects start off as passion projects. But is passion enough? Now that open source code is so essential to how we all build, it’s important for us to treat that code more seriously. To be sustainable, open source can’t rely on passion alone. It needs a little tough love, too. For that, we got an OSPO — an open source program office — to help our developers...

What if you could create a guitar solo just by humming it? That’s Basic Pitch, a new open source project from Spotify’s Audio Intelligence Lab. Basic Pitch is a neural network that can analyze the recording of almost any instrument (including your voice) and then transcribe the notes that it detects into MIDI, the standard file format used for musical notation. It’s like speech-to-text, except it’s turning musical performances — whatever you hum, strum, pluck, peck, or tinkle — into a digital...

In technology, as in life, bad experiences often start with bad data. This is as true with a misguided aunt setting you up on a blind date as it is with machine learning recommendations about which podcast you might want to listen to next. High quality data is essential to making sure every Spotify listener has a rewarding experience made just for them. But with a half trillion events happening on the platform every day, how do you even begin to sort all that data out? Enter Laura Lake,...

Get ready: we’re diving into machine learning. Hear how we’re improving personalization with reinforcement learning (RL), what makes ML engineering so different from other kinds of software engineering, and why machine learning at Spotify is really about humans on one side of an algorithm trying to better understand the humans on the other side of it. Spotify’s director of research, Mounia Lalmas-Roelleke, talks with host Dave Zolotusky about how we’re using RL to optimize recommendations...

In this special bonus episode, Google’s Kelsey Hightower is back to tell us what separates a good talk from a great one, the importance of storytelling, and the pitfalls of relying too much on your demo. For more Kelsey: Listen to Ep.07: “Kelsey Hightower on Engineering Culture” (38 mins.) Follow Kelsey on Twitter @kelseyhightower (DMs are open!) Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng...

The one and only Kelsey Hightower drops by the recording studios at Spotify’s global HQ in Stockholm to chat with host Dave Zolotusky about what it’s like being a software developer today: did it get harder or easier? Hear Dave and Kelsey talk about what happens when tech becomes more accessible to more people, Kelsey’s role models and who he looks to for inspiration, when is the appropriate time to talk to your daughter about Docker containers, what comes after “move fast & break...

Our Audio Intelligence Lab built the world’s beefiest effects pedal using machine learning and Python. Say hello to Pedalboard, an open source framework for adding studio-quality effects to audio files — at a speed and scale well beyond the capabilities of the tools you’d normally find in a music studio. Host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky talks with Peter Sobot (@psobot — not a robot🤖), one of the ML engineers on the team that built Pedalboard. They discuss the world of audio...