Senior Software Engineer Spotify

Senior full-stack role working on a Digital Audio Workstation called Soundtrap. I succeeded at some fairly major challenges here in the context of a complex app and a very large organisation.

Real-time Collaborative Editing

My team in Soundtrap were midway through building a new Google Docs-style autosave & collaborative editing feature when I joined. This feature was well engineered using advanced functional programming concepts, but lacked a clearly articulated perspective on the distributed systems aspect of the problem. As a result there were hard-to-reproduce consistency issues with the design, and the team lacked a shared vocabulary to talk about them.

Drawing on my network from my previous Spotify tenure, I asked a friend from another department – who I knew to be a distributed systems nerd – to come and share some of his knowledge with the team. I worked to build a sense of excitement about the fact that we were solving really hard problems which could be understood using interesting ideas from computer science literature. The motivation boost helped us get the project across the finish line, and learning about concepts like "eventual consistency" and "preservation of user intent" together helped us to describe our observations and ideas more fluently to each other.

Accessibility

Soundtrap signed a lot of new business during the COVID-19 pandemic as music teachers turned to online collaboration in order to continue their work during lockdown. This brought an unforeseen new compliance requirement, as government-funded institutions like schools typically require software vendors to comply with legislation such as Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. This was problematic for Soundtrap, who had a ten year backlog of functionality built without accessibility in mind.

I grabbed this learning opportunity with both hands, retrofitting several accessibility bugs per day with a work rate that became somewhat legendary within the team. I wanted my passion for the topic to be contagious, so I was meticulous about documenting each pull request with e.g. the screen reader UX of a feature before & after the code change. In the final weeks of the project, I produced a large body of documentation about the WCAG success criteria that had most frequently come up while retrofitting, and the specific nuances of how they related to our product. During my evenings I also studied for the IAAP's Certified Professional in Web Accessibility (CPWA) certification, which is a difficult certification that I passed later that year.

Technical Leadership

Soundtrap's unusual front end tech stack was very heavily based on Dart, and the back end was a distributed system comprised of several services. This combination meant that engineering work couldn't benefit freely from the familiar tooling ecosystem that a web engineer normally relies upon, and the setup process for a local development environment was lengthy and involved hacks like running Chrome with the --disable-web-security flag.

One early proposal I made that improved the tooling setup significantly was to integrate the Redux devtools browser extension into the app's homegrown state management system. This put a familiar face on the state transitions that governed the app's behaviour, and proved invaluable for debugging consistency bugs in the real-time collaborative editing feature. Another improvement I made was to introduce an nginx-based reverse proxy and a self-signed SSL certificate to the development environment. This streamlined the setup process significantly, and the addition of the SSL certificate had unexpected benefits, such as facilitating testing in mobile device simulators.

Salesforce Redeployment

My role at Soundtrap was eliminated during the wider Spotify layoff of January 2023. Rather than accept a disruption to my son's first days at preschool and a setback to the union campaign I was leading at Spotify at the time, I chose to turn down the severance offer and take my chances with the redundancy process. I received a more junior, lower paying role focused on Salesforce administration.

This was a challenging time, and I'm eternally grateful for the generosity of spirit shown to me by the Sales Ops team. Learning about B2B SaaS sales was not something I was expecting out of my time at Soundtrap, but became the silver lining in an otherwise quite bleak period of my career.