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This is the story of how we used the Strangler pattern to migrate our public API from a monolithic codebase to a fully fledged BFF over the course of eight years. It also discusses some of the trials and tribulations we encountered along the way. History SoundCloud started as a single Ruby on Rails application […]
It’s my honor to announce that John Carmack and I have initiated a friendly bet of $10,000* to the 501(c)(3) charity of the winner’s choice: By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for passenger use in major cities. I am betting against, and John is […]
In a previous blog post, we explained how we built an internal pull-based exception monitoring service called Periskop — which is heavily influenced by Prometheus — which we open sourced. The adoption of this tool at SoundCloud has proven successful during the past year. Currently, it’s a Golden Path tool in our observability stack, and […]
You’ve probably seen web editors based on the idea of blocks. I’m typing this in WordPress, which has a little + button that brings up a long list of potential blocks that you can insert into this page: This kind of “insert block” user interface concept is showing up in almost every blogging tool, web […]
Imagine yourself as an engineer who just joined SoundCloud. Besides meeting your colleagues and getting your new laptop, badge, and that cool branded hoodie, the first weeks at work will be about exploration. Onboarding involves a lot of “looking around”: finding mentorship, getting to know the company’s culture, and exploring codebases — and most likely, […]
In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career. With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command line. From here, if you were lucky, […]
I am not a Home Assistant expert, but it’s clearly a massive and powerful ecosystem. I’ve interviewed the creator of Home Assistant on my podcast and I encourage you to check out that chat. Home Assistant can quickly become a hobby that overwhelms you. Every object (entity) in your house that is even […]
At Buffer, we’re constantly experimenting with ways we can improve our products and try out new ideas. We recently launched Start Page, a beautiful, flexible, mobile-friendly landing page that you can build in minutes and update in seconds. As a Software Engineer on Buffer’s team I’ve tackled a long list of fun projects, including Start […]
I was reading Gabby’s blog post about the new TypeScript/JavaScript project experience in Visual Studio 2022. You should read the docs on JavaScript and TypeScript in Visual Studio 2022. If you’re used to ASP.NET apps when you think about apps that are JavaScript heavy, “front end apps” or TypeScript focused, it can be […]
I’ve talked about how I love a nice pretty prompt in my Windows Terminal and made videos showing in detail how to do it. I’ve also worked with my buddy TooTallNate to put my real-time blood sugar into a bash or PowerShell prompt, but this was back in 2017. Now that I’m “Team […]