NerdOut@Spotify is a technology podcast produced by the nerds at Spotify and made for the nerd inside all of us. Hear from Spotify engineers about challenging t...
Ever heard of Kubernetes? Envoy? Prometheus? You probably have. But what you may not know is that these projects are managed and sustained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, aka the CNCF. Cloud native computing allows IT and software to move faster, and open source projects are essential to furthering these innovations and keeping them accessible for everyone. The CNCF is dedicated to fostering and sustaining an ecosystem of open source, vendor-neutral projects. In fact, Spotify donated Backstage to the CNCF in September 2020 and it moved to incubating maturity level March 2022. To celebrate the CNCF’s 10th year, host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky speaks with Chris Aniszczyk, Chief Technology Officer at the CNCF to better understand what an open source foundation is, what it does, and why it matters so much to the developer community. Plus, we’ll get a sneak peek at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe.Learn more about Chris Aniszczyk, the CNCF, and open source:NerdOut@Spotify, Ep.02: Open IssuesNerdOut@Spotify, Ep.11: Open Source Work Is WorkCloud Native Computing Foundation blogChris Aniszczyk on TwitterChris's Open Source Velocity ReportsCertified Backstage Associate certification and other certificationsRegister for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon LondonRead what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.comYou should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!
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Join us for Wizards, Portals, and Spotify for Backstage
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 — work with us to build the next great developer portal: yours!
Host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky has a quick chat with Helen Greul, head of engineering for Backstage at Spotify, about the event. They talk about the CNCF’s recent BackstageCon in Paris, the growing popularity of the Backstage platform, and why the roadmap webinar on April 30 isn’t one to miss for fans of developer experience and wizardry.
Register for the April 30 roadmap webinar
Learn more about Spotify and Backstage
Listen to Ep. 01: What Is Backstage?
Watch the 2-minute Backstage explainer video
Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com
You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!
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27: Measuring Developer Productivity
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 more about how we measure developer happiness and productivity at Spotify:
How Spotify measures the value of Backstage: Read about how Spotify’s frequent and less frequent Backstage users compare across three metrics: developer activity, development lifecycle, and developer retention. (Plus, a bonus metric on retention!)
How Backstage Made Our Developers More Effective: Here’s a metric that was starting to scare us: new employees were taking up to 60 days before they made their tenth pull request.
Register for the Spotify for Backstage roadmap webinar: Join us on April 30 to learn about our latest tools for improving developer happiness and productivity.
Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com
You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!
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26: A Trillion Events
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 something useful with it. Easy, right? But now, multiply that process by 50 million events per second. So, how do we make sure all that important data is delivered reliably, from our client apps to the cloud?
Host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky talks with 9-year Spotify veteran Riccardo Petrocco about our journey building a event delivery system that can reliably handle a trillion events around the world, moving from Kafka to the cloud, building systems that are simple enough so that nobody tries to find a way around them and encourages “doing the right thing”, the definition of “quality data”, the value of moving up the stack and focusing less on the data pipes and more on what’s in them, and how Backstage makes it easier for our developers to discover, consume, produce, and manage data.
Learn more about Spotify’s data journey:
NerdOut@Spotify, Ep.09: It’s All About the Data
Data stories 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, LinkedIn, and YouTube!
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25: Voice Translation *Release Notes*
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 engineering manager Sandeep Ghael about how we brought expertise from across the company in order to go from a weekend prototype to releasing fully translated episodes of Lex Fridman, Armchair Expert, and other podcasts — in just six weeks.
Read more about Voice Translation for podcasts:
Spotify’s AI Voice Translation Pilot Means Your Favorite Podcasters Might Be Heard in Your Native Language
Hear the results on Spotify:
Lex Fridman Podcast — “Interview with Yuval Noah Harari”
Armchair Expert — “Kristen Bell, by the grace of god, returns”
The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett — “Interview with Dr. Mindy Pelz”
More episodes on the Voice Translation Hub
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!
NerdOut@Spotify is a technology podcast produced by the nerds at Spotify and made for the nerd inside all of us. Hear from Spotify engineers about challenging tech problems and get a firsthand look into what we're doing, what we're building, and what we’re nerding out about at Spotify every day.
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