December 9th, 2011

Stop! Hacker Time.

At SoundCloud we like to invent new ideas. But we’re not adverse to implementing really great tried and tested ideas like the 20% time concept made famous by Google.

We’re calling it Hacker Time. We’re still very much in start-up mode so we’re keen to nurture the spirit of hacking. We’ve been testing out Hacker Time for a few weeks now and we’re excited about its potential, from industry-changing initiatives like “Are we playing yet” to unusual passion projects like the “Owl Octave”.

Why we’re doing it

When I arrived at SoundCloud I gathered all the engineers and developers in a room and asked them what they wanted more of. This was one of the top requests:

Like every other fast-paced tech company out there, the everyday demands of development leave little time for pet projects or invention outside of the roadmap. But we shouldn’t let great ideas slip away: it’s wasteful of talent and it’s frustrating for developers themselves. Hacker Time is an attempt to keep both the ideas and the employees focused on making the product even better.

I don’t think there’s a single developer at SoundCloud who isn’t a sound creator. Or at least they quickly become one once they’ve joined. We’re a company of electronic music producers, acoustic musicians, field recordists and social sound fanatics. Of course we’re developing the product for 9 million people, but we’re also developing something we want to use ourselves.

Ironically we’re not trying to invent anything new by initiating Hacker Time. Aside from Google, we’ve been watching the Atlassian experiment and are taking a similar approach; we’ll start with a simple set of rules and adapt to what works best for us. Like Atlassian, we’ll be blogging about our experiences too.

Which projects are engineers allowed to work on?

We’ve compiled a list which is not meant to be restrictive but rather should be a guideline:

  • Pet features/improvements that never made it onto the roadmap
  • Apps based on the Soundcloud API
  • Hack Days
  • Anything for SoundCloudLabs.com
  • “this always annoyed me” bug-fixes or architectural improvements
  • Integration of some technology-du-jour with Soundcloud
  • Contributing to OSS used at Soundcloud
  • Other cool projects using SoundCloud
  • Conferences
  • Writing Blog Posts, Technical Articles

How will time be allocated?

The big decision is how to allocate time to these projects. We don’t want to cannibalize valuable product development time but we do want to give people as much freedom as possible,

There are lots of approaches out there – from reserving one day a week, accumulating time to set aside whole weeks or handling that time like vacation. We’ve decided to put the decision-making in the hands of each team, allowing them to allocate Hacker Time according to each team’s workstyle. It’s an experiment, and something we’ll be reviewing in the early stages.

Demo it!

We’re pretty disciplined about demoing work to the whole company. Hacker Time projects will be included in the demos (which happen every 2 weeks at SoundCloud), giving developers a chance to showcase their projects and sparking interest in their hacks from everyone in the organization.

Watch this blog for further reports!

Many thanks to

Atlassian for blogging about their experiences

Simon Stewart from Google
Jim Webber from Neo4J
Jan Lehnhardt from Couchbase
Stefan Roock from it-agile

for sharing their experiences with us.

Experiment Uncategorized 15 Comments

Alexander Grosse
August 27th, 2010

Of CORS We Do

If you’re a JavaScript head, we’ve got something for you. SoundCloud now supports Cross Origin Resource Sharing, using XMLHttpRequest. Or, to put it another way: no more implausible JSON-P hacks.

Some background on CORS can be found here and here.  Our implementation is super-simple:  we let you do GET requests, for our public resources. Full documentation of the feature is on our wiki, but here’s a bit of code to get you started:

var invocation = new XMLHttpRequest();
// Internet Explorer uses a propritary object
// called XDomainRequest
var url = 'http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks';

function callOtherDomain(){
  if(invocation)
  {
    invocation.open('GET', url, true);
    invocation.onreadystatechange = handler;
    invocation.send();
  }

As we’re just setting headers, the implementation was done as an addition to our Rack stack, which means that it’s easy for us to pull out or move around as needed. Once the appropriate headers are added, these newfangled modern browsers handle the rest.

Javascript 2 Comments

Thor
August 26th, 2010

Let’s go backstage. Welcome to the SoundCloud development blog!

Our developers are too cool to not wear sunglasses!

Our very cool devs Matas and Hannes.

With over 15 developers working on the SoundCloud site nowadays, we’re pumping out a steady stream of new features and scalable web application code. It’s been a long journey building up such a great team, with lots of lessons learned along the way. We’re really thankful for the fact that the web startup community is so open about sharing technical knowledge–this has been super-helpful for us sofar. And we’re still regularly checking blogs of peer companies for updates on the latest available technologies and techniques…

So, we thought that now would be a good time to start sharing back some of the innovation that is coming out of our own team, since we’ve got a fair amount of that going on these days. Our aim is to keep this a low-volume, high-quality blog for all things development related–from nightly hacks at Musichackday to server infrastructure to Javascript lazy-loading techniques to NoSQL installations. First up is a highlight on the newly available CORS support in the SoundCloud API built by our mighty summer intern Thor.

We’re excited about this and hope you’ll like it!

Hacks 7 Comments

Eric