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Software Engineer Spotify

Duration
–
Previous role
Software Engineer @ MixRadio
Following role
Front End Architect @ Natural Cycles
Technologies
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • React
  • Sass
Practices
  • A/B testing
  • design sprints
  • mob programming

Full-stack role building and maintaining the Spotify desktop app and web player. I immigrated to Sweden for this role, and it was also my first taste of the politics of larger organisations. Learning how to contribute in this new environment was a major focus here.

Podcasts

Spotify's entry into podcasting was something I was excited to support. The first ever podcast episode page on the web player was added by me personally as a "hack day" project. I also did a lot of UI work relating to video episodes on the desktop app, and later helped to ship the library UI for saved podcasts on desktop.

React

My time at Spotify coincided with the infamous iframe-based micro frontends architecture. This architecture was no longer popular internally when my tenure began and there was a growing consensus around migrating to React.

I invested some of the only voluntary overtime of my career in overcoming the institutional inertia around this transition, rewriting small parts of the desktop app in React one at a time in order to help progress the conversation from "if" to "how". Later I was part of the team who rebuilt the Spotify embed widget in React.

Sass

Less was the CSS preprocessor of choice at Spotify for the same reason as at many other companies: it was a legacy decision dating back to Bootstrap's heyday. For a JavaScript-centric front end engineer this was still fine in the late 2010s, but felt limiting and antiquated to a more CSS-centric engineer.

A colleague and I identified this as an opportunity to share some CSS love in the team (and maybe build some confidence for the React transition). We took it upon ourselves to migrate the desktop app – and later the web player too – from Less to Sass. It took a hefty combination of tech & people skills from us both to land a change this big without requiring a top-down edict to pave the way.

Node

The use of PHP to power open.spotify.com had become an obstacle to innovation by the time I joined that team. Consensus around Node as the ideal replacement was very strong, but progress was blocked by a combination of inertia and internal architectural rules.

A group formed to look at this issue during a Hack Week, and a small but important contribution I made to that initiative was convincing the group to prioritise adding Node to the site's Docker image and shipping it to production rather than writing an RFC about it. I believe shipping something small broke down more psychological barriers than anything we could have said in an RFC. Later, in the final months of my time in this role, I spent any slack time I could find rewriting our trickiest PHP in Node to facilitate the Node transition beyond my departure date.