NerdOut@Spotify

Latest Episodes:

18: Meet Your Personal AI DJ May 04, 2023

Show notes

How do you make an AI-generated voice feel more like a real person? You give it a real personality. Spotify recently released a new feature in the US and Canada called DJ. Turn it on, and you hear a curated selection of music and recommendations, along with a fun, friendly, knowledgeable voice telling you more about what you’re listening to (you know, like a real DJ) — except everything you hear is personalized just for you. Learn what makes this DJ feel so realistic and meet the people behind the technology — including the DJ himself.

Host Dave Zolotusky talks with product director Zeena Qureshi and director of engineering John Flynn — together they lead Speak, the team at Spotify responsible for DJ’s realistic, expressive voice. Hear how the AI voice technology they pioneered for Hollywood blockbusters and triple-A video games now brings Spotify’s personalized DJ to life, how they record a range of emotions to create deeper datasets for modeling DJ’s unique personality, the technical challenges of generating and delivering these dynamic performances at the press of a button, and how having your own personal audio guide brings a totally new dimension to the Spotify listening experience. You’ll also hear from the person who provides the raw ingredients for the AI DJ’s voice and soul: the real-life Xavier “X” Jernigan.

Learn more about Spotify’s personalized DJ and the technology behind it:

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!

17: Building Apps at Spotify Scale Mar 16, 2023

Show notes

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!

16: Backstage Adopters Speak Feb 23, 2023

Show notes

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:

Listen to more episodes about Backstage:

Or check out the links below:

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!

15: Your Very Own Developer Advocate Feb 02, 2023

Show notes

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!

14: For Love and Money? Jan 12, 2023

Show notes

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:

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!

13: Advent of Code Live! Dec 15, 2022

Show notes

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!

12: Fleet First Nov 17, 2022

Show notes

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!

11: Open Source Work Is Work Oct 27, 2022

Show notes

If you look at any of our open source projects, you’re bound to see the phrase “Made with 💚 at Spotify.” That’s because many open source projects start off as passion projects. But is passion enough? Now that open source code is so essential to how we all build, it’s important for us to treat that code more seriously. To be sustainable, open source can’t rely on passion alone. It needs a little tough love, too. For that, we got an OSPO — an open source program office — to help our developers (and Spotify) get the most out of their open source experience.

Host Dave Zolotusky talks with Per Ploug, our open source tech lead and head of Spotify’s OSPO. You’ll hear about what developers can learn from open sourcing their projects, why we shouldn’t treat open source like a side gig, how to measure the success of an open source project (by the number of stars on GitHub, of course), what open source at Spotify looked like in the past (the good, the bad, the so-so), and what we hope it looks like tomorrow.

Read more about open source at Spotify on the Spotify Engineering blog:

Listen to more episodes about open source at Spotify:

10: Basic Pitch: Our audio-to-MIDI converter uses a neural network to transcribe the recordings of almost any musical instrument🎺🎸🎻🎤🪗
06: Bits of Math at Scale: Pedalboard is a Python library for applying studio-quality audio effects at scale🎶
04: Backstage in the Wild: Why Netflix and American Airlines both adopted our platform for developer portals for their own engineering teams📺✈️
03: Community Builders: What’s it like when you suddenly find yourself with a popular open source project and a fast-growing, global community of contributors😬
02: Open Issues: How to go from Hack Week project to public repo in two weeks instead of six months😅
01: What Is Backstage?: Why we open sourced our homegrown developer portal and how it improves the everyday experience of developers🧑🏻‍💻

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!

10: Basic Pitch Oct 06, 2022

Show notes

What if you could create a guitar solo just by humming it? That’s Basic Pitch, a new open source project from Spotify’s Audio Intelligence Lab. Basic Pitch is a neural network that can analyze the recording of almost any instrument (including your voice) and then transcribe the notes that it detects into MIDI, the standard file format used for musical notation. It’s like speech-to-text, except it’s turning musical performances — whatever you hum, strum, pluck, peck, or tinkle — into a digital score you can edit on your computer.

Hear host Dave Zolotusky talk with Spotify researcher Rachel Bittner about what makes detecting musical notes an interesting machine learning problem. You’ll learn about how musicians use audio-to-MIDI converters to make music, the subtleties of pitch tracking, and why you want your model to capture the main pitch events in the audio as well as all the “wiggly stuff”. Plus, a live demo of the model in action and all the “Hot Cross Buns” you can handle.

Listen to the end of the episode to hear "Virgo", the single that artist-producer Bad Snacks composed using Basic Pitch.🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻

Basic Pitch is open source software that musicians can use online for free and that ML developers and researchers can tinker with and contribute to.

Can you play an instrument or hum a tune? Try it yourself at BasicPitch.io
Contribute on GitHub in the Python repo or the TypeScript repo
Soundtrap is Spotify’s collaborative, online digital audio workstation (DAW) for musicians, podcasters, and audio producers
Read more on the Spotify Engineering blog: Meet Basic Pitch: Spotify’s Open Source Audio-to-MIDI Converter
Listen to a track composed using Basic Pitch: “Virgo” by Bad Snacks on Spotify
Watch the making-of video on her YouTube channel: Spotify Made an Audio to MIDI Converter (?!?) - Basic Pitch Overview
Listen to “Op37 Maximum Shimmer” and other demo tracks composed by the Spotify developers who made Basic Pitch

Want more open source goodness from Spotify’s Audio Intelligence Lab? Listen to Ep.06: Bits of Math at Scale to learn about Pedalboard, a Python library for applying studio-quality audio effects at scale.

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!

09: It's All About the Data Sep 15, 2022

Show notes

In technology, as in life, bad experiences often start with bad data. This is as true with a misguided aunt setting you up on a blind date as it is with machine learning recommendations about which podcast you might want to listen to next. High quality data is essential to making sure every Spotify listener has a rewarding experience made just for them. But with a half trillion events happening on the platform every day, how do you even begin to sort all that data out?

Enter Laura Lake, senior director of Spotify’s Personalization Insights team. When she first arrived here, even simple questions were difficult to answer without teams having to “knit together 50 different data sources”. In this episode, she talks with host Dave Zolotusky about a critical point in Spotify’s growth and the yearslong journey that resulted in improving and ensuring the quality of the data that all our developers rely on.

Hear about the technological and cultural changes that led to both better quality data and better collaboration between our teams — and how we use the data to build the knowledge models that lead to Discover Weekly, Daily Mix, and a more personalized experience for every one of Spotify’s hundreds of millions of listeners. How do we know if our ML models are doing what we want them to? Did our listeners actually discover something new? Let’s dig into the data.

This is the second episode in our miniseries about machine learning and personalization at Spotify.

Listen to Ep.08 “Humans in the Loop” to learn what the research tells us about the long-term satisfaction of our listeners — and what makes the job of an ML engineer so different from other kinds of software engineers.

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!

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