NerdOut@Spotify Spotify R&D

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, whose job is to make sure every Spotify developer has a great experience building, no matter what Spotify app they’re building for. They talk about adopting Bazel, reducing local build times with remote caching, managing multiple monorepos and zillions of dependencies, doing big tech migrations (Objective-C to Swift, Java to Kotlin) without slowing down, open sourcing our tools, and contributing to the Mobile Native Foundation.

Learn more about how we build mobile apps at Spotify:


Kodeco: Building with Bazel: Online tutorial made in collaboration with Spotify
BazelCon 2022: Our BazelCon talk about driving architectural improvements with dependency metrics
XCRemoteCache: Open source remote cache tool for Xcode projects that reuses target artifacts generated on a remote machine, served from a simple REST server
XCLogParser: Open source tool to parse Xcode and xcodebuild logs stored in the xcactivitylog format
2022 Mobile Ecosystem: Data from the Mobile Native Foundation's first mobile ecosystem survey
My Beat: Patrick Balestra
Mobile development posts on the Spotify Engineering Blog

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng and on LinkedIn!

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 portals. This panel discussion took place on December 15, 2022 at the launch event for Spotify Plugins for Backstage, our new developer software bundle.

At the event, Tyson is joined on stage by Guillermo Manzo (Expedia Group), Boyan Vassilev (Bank of the West), Jason Miller (Booz Allen Hamilton), and Nate Axcell (TELUS) to talk about the costs of context switching, breaking down organizational silos, how to get your developers started and how to get them unstuck, open source, inner source, golden paths, and the importance of making sure the best way to do something is the easiest way to do something otherwise it just doesn’t get done.

Learn more about Spotify Plugins for Backstage:


Shipping Spotify’s Culture: 5 Plugins (and 4 Principles) for Supercharging Developer Experience at Scale
Spotify Plugins for Backstage

Listen to more episodes about Backstage:


Ep.01: What is Backstage?
Ep.02: Open Issues
Ep.03: Community Builders
Ep.04: Backstage in the Wild

Or check out the links below:


Watch the Backstage Explainer Video (2 mins.)
Get started at backstage.io
Contribute to Backstage on GitHub
Explore more open source projects from Spotify

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng and on LinkedIn!

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 Serah Kiburu, a Spotify engineer and senior developer advocate. They discuss how and why Spotify supports third-party developers, the value of being “customer zero” for our own developer tools, our most popular APIs, the importance of listening before you start building, Serah’s journey to Spotify in Stockholm, and how she’s preparing for the robot apocalypse.

Learn more about the resources we provide third-party developers:


Spotify for Developers: Where to find our public APIs, SDKs, libraries, documentation, and community news
Serah Njambi Kiburu and Her Hack Week Team: Read more about Serah and her team’s work, including their project from last year’s Hack Week

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng and on LinkedIn!

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 it takes to sustain something that started as a passion project in 2014 and then grew to become much more.

Rafael talks with our host Dave Zolotusky and Per Ploug, Spotify’s open source tech lead, who helped set up our FOSS fund. They discuss how Spotify decided which projects to fund, why giving away (and accepting) free money is harder than you might think, and what it’s really like maintaining a popular open source project all on your own.

Learn more about the recipients of the the Spotify FOSS Fund and other ways we’re working to create a more sustainable open source ecosystem:


Announcing the Spotify FOSS Fund
Say Hello to the Recipients of the 2022 Spotify FOSS Fund
Q&A with the Maintainers of the Spotify FOSS Fund
The Open Future
Byte Buddy
@ByteBuddyHQ on Twitter
@rafaelcodes on Twitter + Mastodon

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng and on LinkedIn!

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 leaderboard? Play along with us and find out!

Plus, Spotify engineers share what makes this friendly, low-stakes coding competition so much fun every year, Jimmy answers questions from the live audience (including offering some speed tips), and more.

The Advent of Code season is upon us once again:


Advent of Code 2022 — Day 6: The puzzle we’re attempting to solve in this episode. Play along with us — when you hear the boxing bell ring in the episode, click the link above and see how fast you can come up with a solution. Can you beat us to it?
05: Advent of Code: Listen to our previous episode about this annual Spotify tradition and learn more about the community that’s grown up around it.
adventofcode.com: It’s never too late to join in the fun. Start on Day 1 and see how far you can go.

Special thanks to Eric Wastl for creating such a fun thing.

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng and on LinkedIn!

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 control over their codebases. Could we really get our squad-based culture to adopt a fleet-first mindset?

Spotify’s chief architect, Niklas Gustavsson (aka, ngn), returns to the podcast to talk to host Dave Zolotusky about how we can safely make changes to thousands of repos at once (without bothering the repos’ owners), why adopting Fleet Management at Spotify was a cultural shift as much as a technological one, how having this level of automation in place helped us mitigate the log4j security incident within a few hours, the intricacies of software dependencies, the benefits of tech standards, and more. Welcome to the Fleet.

Learn more:


Launching soon: Spotify Plugins for Backstage: Read about the Soundcheck plugin, which we use to promote consistency and quality across our 10,000 software components.
Large-Scale Automated Refactoring Using ClangMR: Read a research paper on Google’s system for maintaining large monorepos — an approach we considered as we formulated our Fleet Management strategy for a multi-repo environment.

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng and on LinkedIn!