Top all-time · #931
SoundCloud Backstage Blog
Company blog · developers.soundcloud.com/blogprogramming
SoundCloud Backstage Blog is the company blog at developers.soundcloud.com, writing about programming. Since 2012, 73 different Hacker News readers have linked it 129 times, most often “Prometheus: Monitoring at SoundCloud”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-11, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 2 of 33 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link SoundCloud's engineering blog as a source for infrastructure write-ups, including the Prometheus monitoring announcement, the Roshi CRDT system, circuit-breaking resilience lessons and an instance store.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 33 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Prometheus: Monitoring at SoundCloud5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2015-01-26
- Roshi: a CRDT system for timestamped events5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-05-12
- Garbage Collection in Redux Applications3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-01-24
- /blog/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-05-19
- Did I break you? Reverse dependency verification2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-05-25
- /docs/api/terms-of-use2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-11-09
- Share, Stream, Customize - SoundCloud Developers2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-06-09
- Microservices and data ownership2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-06-21
- Periskop: Exception Monitoring Service2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-03-16
- Alerting on SLOs Like Pros2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-06-06
What Hacker News says?
re pagination/infinite scroll: I had the same problem, it was fucking unbearable to check out peoples' earlier stuff. Luckily, Soundcloud has a very decent public API, which you can use to roll your own narrow client, for whatever you're looking for with the features you want: https://developers.soundcloud.com/docs/api ---- Here, start from my own (extremely crude, for personal use, not for public consumption) "Soun…
Comment linking /docs/api
on “SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses”Submitted Roshi: a CRDT system for timestamped events as a story · 108 points
HN discussionAt my company we have a bunch of content that's only archived on SoundCloud. The main barrier I've had to backing up original uploads (only available through the web interface) is the terrible reliability of all the AJAX calls. Even with browser automation, it requires a LOT of error-handling just to navigate between resources successfully. It seems that all these microservices[1] are there for the sake of blogging…
Comment linking /blog/building-products-at-soundcloud-part-3-microservices-in-scala-and-finagle
on “SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses”Submitted Did I break you? Reverse dependency verification as a story · 73 points
HN discussionAnother anecdote: I have played with their JavaScript API about 2 or 3 years ago and it was constantly broken, with no way to report those bugs. Their support page states "ask on StackOverflow" as it stated back then, which is a terrible way to report bugs. https://developers.soundcloud.com/support
Comment linking /support
on “SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses”Submitted Building Products at SoundCloud – Part I: Dealing with the Monolith as a story · 66 points
HN discussionExcellent product and targeting, actually almost muttered 'ooooh' after reading your post. I'd also add in some other promotional channels on next iteration like Soundcloud uploads. Promotional and general 'radio' like stations, I find lots of new music at Soundcloud, get started http://developers.soundcloud.com/docs
Comment linking /docs
on “What I've been up to for the past year”Submitted Prometheus: Monitoring at SoundCloud as a story · 62 points
HN discussionSoundCloud | Senior Software Engineer, iOS / Engineering Manager | NYC | Onsite, Full-time SoundCloud is an open platform enabling everyone to share and discover audio content all over the world. Here at SoundCloud NYC we’re expanding our monetization & growth engineering team (currently a team of 23) who help build the platform that helps creators make money from their content, listeners gain access to the world's…
Comment linking /blog
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2017)”Submitted SoundCloud's Data Science Process as a story · 17 points
HN discussionBackend Engineer (Scala) | SoundCloud (Discovery/Recommendations) | Berlin | Onsite | Full-time | Relocation I'm an engineer on SoundCloud's Recommendations team. We are looking for scala engineers to help users find lit tracks on the world's largest audio platform. You'll work alongside data scientists and engineers in a stack based on Spark, Scala, Finagle, and Cassandra. SoundCloud is a wonderful place to work an…
Comment linking /blog/tracks
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2016)”Submitted Deliver software faster by managing work in progress, not by adding overtime as a story · 16 points
HN discussionSoundCloud | Mobile Engineers, iOS, Android | NYC | Onsite, Full-time SoundCloud is an open platform enabling everyone to share and discover audio content all over the world. Here at SoundCloud NYC we’re expanding our monetization & growth engineering team (currently a team of 15) who help build the platform that helps creators make money from their content, listeners gain access to the world's music, and brands eng…
Comment linking /blog
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2017)”Submitted Less Is More: Why Audio on SoundCloud Looks Different as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSoundCloud | Mobile Engineers, iOS, Android | NYC | Onsite, Full-time SoundCloud is an open platform enabling everyone to share and discover audio content all over the world. Here at SoundCloud NYC we’re expanding our monetization & growth engineering team (currently a team of 15) who help build the platform that helps creators make money from their content, listeners gain access to the world's music, and brands eng…
Comment linking /blog
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2017)”Submitted React Native at SoundCloud as a story · 10 points
HN discussionGood blog about prometheus - https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/prometheus-monitoring...
Comment linking /blog/prometheus-monitoring-at-soundcloud
on “Riemann – A network monitoring system”Submitted Evolution of SoundCloud’s Architecture as a story · 9 points
HN discussionAnnounced here: https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/prometheus-monitoring...
Comment linking /blog/prometheus-monitoring-at-soundcloud
on “Prometheus: An open-source service monitoring system and time series database”Submitted The Power of Types for Errors as a story · 9 points
HN discussionActivity streams are such a common use case. It is very interesting that Soundcloud chose to do something different: https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/roshi-a-crdt-system-f... Assembling the inbox on demand is quite interesting. I don't quite understand the querying and operations involved with Roshi for doing that.
Comment linking /blog/roshi-a-crdt-system-for-timestamped-events
on “Moving persistent data out of Redis”Submitted Building Products at SoundCloud – Part II: Breaking the Monolith as a story · 9 points
HN discussionMaybe somebody from soundcloud ? https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/roshi-a-crdt-system-f...
Comment linking /blog/roshi-a-crdt-system-for-timestamped-events
on “Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDT)”Submitted Leveraging iOS Frameworks to Speed Up Development at SoundCloud as a story · 8 points
HN discussionHey, How does this comply with SoundCloud's API Terms of Use? https://developers.soundcloud.com/docs/api/terms-of-use More specifically: > Unacceptable Use > use of the SoundCloud® API to aggregate and stream User Content from multiple users into an on demand listening service; I've built similar things in the past ( https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusChromeExtension ), but using SoundCloud's API for such a project a…
Comment linking /docs/api/terms-of-use
on “Soundcloud for the Desktop”Submitted How to build a SoundCloud powered Children's Toy as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI like how JSON-LD lets one embed many resources inside a document. And there are plenty of good preludes to this recent emergence: Soundcloud wrote about how they used an instance store 3 years ago in their clientside to extract all relevant models, and push them into an "instance store" where anyone else might find the data when they need it. https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/building-the-next-sou... What's r…
Comment linking /blog/building-the-next-soundcloud
on “GraphQL Introduction”Submitted Data Pipelines with Apache Crunch and Java 8 as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSoundcloud's API docs are quite impressive esp. their use of apigee console to test things out in the browser: http://developers.soundcloud.com/docs/ There's also a startup dedicated to (startup) API docs :) http://turnapi.com/
Comment linking /docs/
on “Designing Great API Docs”Submitted Open Sourcing Intervene as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
