# Twtxt is an open, distributed microblogging platform that
# uses human-readable text files, common transport protocols,
# and free software.
#
# Learn more about twtxt at https://github.com/buckket/twtxt
#
# This is an automated Yarn.social feed running feeds v0.1.0@72e53a9
# Learn more about Yarn.social at https://yarn.social
#
# nick = spotify-engineering
# url = https://feeds.twtxt.net/spotify-engineering/twtxt.txt
# type = rss
# source = https://engineering.atspotify.com/feed/
# avatar = https://feeds.twtxt.net/spotify-engineering/avatar.png#phkafxz2om55rgpbwb55ghv3ldzixij4bq5i446cerra6kzt7w4a
# description =
# updated_at = 2023-12-05T17:14:27Z
#
2022-03-04T14:47:08Z **Jordan Loeser: Web Engineer**
Tell us more about working on Spotify Wrapped… My main focus on Wrapped was the social media share cards – the static images that summarize the information from someone’s data stories and can be shared on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. Since these cards must accommodate a variety of languages and dynamic data within [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/03/jordan-loeser-web-engineer/)
2022-03-01T13:56:07Z **Introducing NerdOut@Spotify: A New Podcast for Developers**
TL;DR For years, Spotify’s official engineering blog has been giving you a peek behind the curtain at Spotify R&D. Today, we’re announcing NerdOut@Spotify, our new R&D podcast that gives you another view into our tech world. In each episode I’ll talk with Spotify developers about challenging tech problems and give you a firsthand look into [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/03/introducing-nerdout-at-spotify-tech-podcast/)
2022-02-28T15:59:36Z **Search Journey Towards Better Experimentation Practices**
At Spotify, we aim to build and improve our product in a data-informed way. To do that, teams are encouraged to generate and test hypotheses by running experiments and gathering evidence for what works and what doesn’t. In the Search team, in our journey towards this goal, we have learned that, besides having the ambition, [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/02/search-journey-towards-better-experimentation-practices/)
2022-02-22T18:26:37Z **Mesfin Mekonnen: Senior Engineer**
Tell us more about working on Spotify Wrapped… I specialize in iOS Engineering and was one of a few iOS embeds working on 2021 Wrapped. We divided up the various Wrapped stories amongst ourselves — my focus was on Top Five Artists, Top Five Songs, Top Five Podcasts, Top Genres and the Audio Aura, which [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/02/mesfin-mekonnen-senior-engineer/)
2022-02-16T13:11:05Z **Fred Wang: Senior Backend Engineer**
Tell us more about working on Spotify Wrapped… I’m part of the Mambas team at Spotify, which is responsible for all the animation, presentation and personalized data in the Wrapped interactive mobile app. My job is to take the raw data from the backend and enrich it, translate it and format it for different regions [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/02/fred-wang-senior-backend-engineer/)
2022-03-09T13:34:37Z **Chantal Delfeld: Engineer**
7:00am My early mornings are spent running about after my children – getting them dressed, giving them breakfast and putting on their sunscreen, so they’re all ready for the day ahead. At 8am, I drive my daughter to preschool, while my mom looks after my one-year-old son – she’s been living with us since the start [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/03/chantal-delfeld-engineer/)
2022-03-11T15:46:11Z **Incident Report: Spotify Outage on March 8**
On March 8, we experienced a global outage triggered by issues in a cloud-hosted service discovery system used at Spotify. We were made aware of issues with login at 18:12 UTC / 13:12 ET and started implementing fixes to critical systems at 18:39 UTC / 13:39 ET. This outage affected our users and we apologize [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/03/incident-report-spotify-outage-on-march-8/)
2022-03-14T12:57:31Z **Why We Switched Our Data Orchestration Service**
TL;DR Within Spotify, we run 20,000 batch data pipelines defined in 1,000+ repositories, owned by 300+ teams — daily. The majority of our pipelines rely on two tools: Luigi (for the Python folks) and Flo (for the Java folks). In 2019, the data orchestration team at Spotify decided to move away from these tools. In [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/03/why-we-switched-our-data-orchestration-service%ef%bf%bc/)
2022-03-17T12:36:02Z **Introducing Natural Language Search for Podcast Episodes**
Beyond term-based Search Until recently, Search at Spotify relied mostly on term matching. For example, if you type the query “electric cars climate impact”, Elasticsearch will return search results that contain everything that has each of those query words in its indexed metadata (like in the title of a podcast episode). However, we know users [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/03/introducing-natural-language-search-for-podcast-episodes/)
2022-03-18T13:04:14Z **Zela Taino: iOS Engineer**
Tell us more about working on Spotify Wrapped… As Tech Lead for Wrapped, I was in charge of laying out the road map for the mobile and backend engineers – as well as working with the brand, design, creative and localization teams to make sure everything went smoothly from an engineering point of view. With [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/03/zela-taino-ios-engineer/)
2022-03-23T15:09:24Z **Comparing quantiles at scale in online A/B-testing**
TL;DR: Using the properties of the Poisson bootstrap algorithm and quantile estimators, we have been able to reduce the computational complexity of Poisson bootstrap difference-in-quantiles confidence intervals enough to unlock bootstrap inference for almost arbitrary large samples. At Spotify, we can now easily calculate bootstrap confidence intervals for difference-in-quantiles in A/B tests with hundreds of [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/03/comparing-quantiles-at-scale-in-online-a-b-testing/)
2022-04-22T13:21:12Z **Announcing the Spotify FOSS Fund**
TLDR: Spotify is starting a Free and Open Source Software Fund (FOSS Fund) to pay maintainers of independent projects. This new initiative is about giving back to open source developers and is one of the ways we are investing in a more sustainable open source ecosystem for all of us. The fund will start at [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/04/announcing-the-spotify-foss-fund/)
2022-04-14T13:05:51Z **Spotify’s Player API: Your Toolkit for Controlling Spotify Programmatically**
In 2017, we launched the Spotify Connect Web API, a set of tools that developers could use to programmatically start, stop, and manage Spotify audio playback from the web. This post presents an overview of what you can do with the API, now called the Player API, and some background information about how it came [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/04/spotifys-player-api/)
2022-04-28T13:22:32Z **Spotify Live: From Live to Recording**
Spotify Live (formerly Spotify Greenroom) is a platform that democratizes live audio streams. Creators are able to create rooms and stream live directly to fans who join the room. They can also interact directly with their fans either by text chatting in the app or bringing them up as speakers to interact by voice. But [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/04/spotify-live-from-live-to-recording/)
2022-05-04T13:20:33Z **Supporting Future Engineers: Spotify’s Partnership with The Marcy Lab School**
In September 2020, we had the exciting opportunity to partner with The Marcy Lab School with the hopes of creating opportunities for Fellows to: (1) interact with Spotify employees (2) receive training in how to navigate the technical interview process at Spotify and beyond, and (3) become well-versed in the Spotify Internship and Fellowship application [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/05/supporting-future-engineers-spotifys-partnership-with-the-marcy-lab-school/)
2022-05-12T13:21:30Z **Failing Forward — How We Grow from Incidents**
This past year, a few of us who focus on the reliability of Spotify for Artists (S4A) spent some time taking a look at the collection of incidents directly affecting S4A in 2021. We made some hypotheses, and then went to work analyzing each one to build a set of quantitative and qualitative metrics. We [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/05/failing-forward-how-we-grow-from-incidents/)
2022-05-31T12:57:06Z **The Open Future**
TL;DR What is the future of open source going to look like? At Spotify, we think it’s important to play an active role in helping to preserve what’s best about the community today while fostering the changes necessary for it to continue to succeed tomorrow. From increasing the impact of the projects we open source, [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/05/the-open-future/)
2022-06-01T23:46:24Z **Meet Basic Pitch: Spotify’s Open Source Audio-to-MIDI Converter**
Introducing Basic Pitch, Spotify’s free open source tool for converting audio into MIDI. Basic Pitch uses machine learning to transcribe the musical notes in a recording. Drop a recording of almost any instrument, including your voice, then get back a MIDI version, just like that. Unlike similar ML models, Basic Pitch is not only versatile [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/06/meet-basic-pitch/)
2022-06-02T11:10:06Z **Say Hello to the Recipients of the 2022 Spotify FOSS Fund**
TL;DR Today we’re announcing the recipients of the first Spotify FOSS Fund. The objective of this fund is to give the independent open source projects we care about a meaningful financial sponsorship to help ensure those projects have the means to continue maintaining and maturing the code we rely on. The 2022 Spotify FOSS Fund [...] ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/06/say-hello-to-the-recipients-of-the-2022-spotify-foss-fund/)
2022-06-16T08:46:39Z **How We Built Infrastructure to Run User Forecasts at Spotify **
TL;DR With Spotify’s rapid global expansion to more than 180 countries, it’s critical that the infrastructure of user forecasts catch up to business needs. As the business evolves, we need an infrastructure in place that can satisfy the varying needs of stakeholders across the company. To enable fast iterations and facilitate model training, we built [...]
The post [How We Built Infrastructur ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/06/how-we-built-infrastructure-to-run-user-forecasts-at-spotify-%ef%bf%bc/)
2022-06-23T13:54:09Z **Q&A with the Maintainers of the Spotify FOSS Fund**
TL;DR We recently announced the 2022 recipients of the Spotify FOSS Fund, which we created to help support the open source projects we use at Spotify. As this was the first time we’ve made direct financial contributions to independent open source projects, we wanted to learn more about what kind of impact our contributions might [...]
The post [Q&A with the Maintainers of the Spotify FOSS Fund](https://engineering.atspoti ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/06/q-and-a-with-the-maintainers-of-the-spotify-foss-fund/)
2022-07-05T16:06:04Z **What it Took to Scale Spotify’s Marketing Efforts**
At Spotify, we’ve tried to uphold the tradition of running one major holiday marketing campaign at the end of each year. The campaigns typically run on various platforms such as the Spotify Homepage and the Premium page. More recently, we wanted to run more campaigns throughout the year, perhaps during different holidays like Halloween or [...]
The post [What it Took to Scale Spotify’s Marketing Efforts](https://engineering.a ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/07/what-it-took-to-scale-spotifys-marketing-efforts/)
2022-07-25T16:41:36Z **Software Visualization — Challenge, Accepted**
TL;DR Architectural diagrams are the bread and butter of software design and a foundational tool for communication and collaboration on software development. At Spotify, we have an incredibly complex network of thousands of interlinked software systems owned by hundreds of teams, so having a simple way to visualize these connections is essential. While capturing all [...]
The post [Software Visualization — Challenge, Accepted](https://eng ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/07/software-visualization-challenge-accepted/)
2022-08-23T13:31:10Z **How We Maintain Security Testing within the Software Development Life Cycle**
TL;DR The software development life cycle (SDLC) has always been followed by functional testing to ensure software solutions have all the necessary features and functions. Because of the growing number of cyberattacks, software development stakeholders have been forced to implement security testing as the main track in SDLC to prevent vulnerabilities and flaws in applications ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/08/how-we-maintain-security-testing-within-the-software-development-life-cycle/)
2022-09-15T17:25:06Z **Scaling Translations at Spotify**
Last year, we added support for 36 new languages to our products in one go, for a total of 62 languages. This article describes how we delivered on such an immense localization effort at Spotify. We called the project Scaling Translations. The business case We believe that localization is key for engaging with our users [...]
The post [Scaling Translations at Spotify](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/09/scaling-translations-at-spotify/) appeared first o ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/09/scaling-translations-at-spotify/)
2022-09-29T14:17:30Z **From Development to Real Users: How to Create a Web Performance Story**
Some of the most common questions asked when it comes to work with performance are, How do you convince stakeholders that improving the performance of your project is actually worth the investment? How can you prove that the work is necessary to begin with? Or prove that you have shipped improvements? And what is the [...]
The post [From Development to Real Users: How to Create a Web Per ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/09/from-development-to-real-users-how-to-create-a-web-performance-story/)
2022-09-29T18:24:16Z **Protected: Lessons Learned from Algorithmic Impact Assessments in Practice**
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
The post [Protected: Lessons Learned from Algorithmic Impact Assessments in Practice](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/09/lessons-learned-from-algorithmic-impact-assessments-in-practice/) appeared first on [Spotify Engineering](https://engineering.atspotify.com). ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/09/lessons-learned-from-algorithmic-impact-assessments-in-practice/)
2022-10-05T12:52:31Z **Open Source Work Is Work**
Back in June, I presented the current state of Spotify’s open source activities to our developers as part of our internal Spotify Engineering Conference, aka SpEC. In the presentation, I go over where we currently are with our open source efforts, what challenges we face, and the vision for where we are going. Centered around [...]
The post [Open Source Work Is Work](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/10/open-source-work-is-work/) appeared first on [Spotify Engineering] ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/10/open-source-work-is-work/)
2022-10-25T12:59:09Z **Bringing the Climate Fight to Your IDE**
TL;DR As part of Spotify’s goal to reach net zero emissions by 2030, we’ve made climate action one of our five technology pillars and have been integrating sustainability into our everyday engineering practices. This year, climate action was the theme of our company-wide Hack Week, we made climate responsibility part of our official engineering handbook, [...]
The post [Bringing the Climate Fight to Your IDE](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022 ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/10/bringing-the-climate-fight-to-your-ide/)
2022-10-27T13:16:08Z **How We Improved the Development Experience for our Client Developers **
TL;DR The core motivation for Spotify’s Client Platform (CliP) team is empowering and unblocking client developers and giving teams the tools they need to ensure a happy and satisfying developer experience (DX). In line with this, we wanted to improve the coding experience for our development teams through infrastructure changes. We conducted research among 318 [...]
The post ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/10/how-we-improved-the-development-experience-for-our-client-developers-%ef%bf%bc/)
2022-11-08T09:00:00Z **Spotify’s Vulnerability Management Platform**
We started developing our vulnerability management platform (VMP) at Spotify in Q2, 2020, and now that we’ve implemented it and use the system in our day-to-day work, we wanted to take a moment to share our journey to help reduce security risks in an efficient and scalable manner. Vulnerabilities Preventing vulnerabilities within Spotify is the [...]
The post [Spotify’s Vulnerability Management Platform](https://engineering.atspotify.com/ ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/11/spotifys-vulnerability-management-platform/)
2022-11-15T14:51:09Z **Strategies and Tools for Performing Migrations on Platform**
Needing to deliver faster and more reliably while managing a growing number of contributors and a more complex codebase seems like the fate of every hyper-growth tech company. For platform teams, the challenge is not any different. How can we quickly roll out and increase the adoption of new technologies safely with a growing codebase [...]
The post [Strategies and Tools for Performing Migrations on Platform ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/11/strategies-and-tools-for-performing-migrations-on-platform/)
2022-12-15T19:04:51Z **Shipping Spotify’s Culture: 5 Plugins (and 4 Principles) for Supercharging Developer Experience at Scale**
ICYMI Spotify officially began selling enterprise software today: the Spotify Plugins for Backstage bundle subscription. Some of these commercial plugins began life as internal tools, built by Spotify developers, for Spotify developers. Other plugins in the bundle are brand new to the Backstage platform. But they all embod ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/12/shipping-spotifys-culture-5-plugins-and-4-principles-for-supercharging-developer-experience-at-scale/)
2023-01-05T16:59:04Z **What’s a “Listening Personality”?**
We did a couple of new things in Wrapped this year, and one of these is a thing called Your Listening Personality. You got one. There are 16 of them, in total: It’s not a lottery or a horoscope, though. As the four-letter codes at the bottom of each one hint, each Listening Personality is [...]
The post [What’s a “Listening Personality”?](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/01/whats-a-listening-personality/) appeared first on [Spotify Engine ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/01/whats-a-listening-personality/)
2023-01-18T16:31:14Z **Agile Coaching (AC) at Spotify: Shining a Light on the AC Career Framework**
At Spotify, change is a constant, and our agile coaches are here to help teams and leaders thrive as we evolve. With agile principles famously part of our DNA, Spotify doesn’t need “transformation coaches,” as they are often known in the industry, but coaches who transform as organizational needs change. In the early 2010s, our [...]
The post [Agile Coaching (AC) at Spotify: Shin ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/01/agile-coaching-ac-at-spotify-shining-a-light-on-the-ac-career-framework/)
2023-02-01T14:40:58Z **Unleashing ML Innovation at Spotify with Ray**
Introduction As the field of machine learning (ML) continues to evolve and its impact on society and various aspects of our lives grows, it is becoming increasingly important for practitioners and innovators to consider a broader range of perspectives when building ML models and applications. This desire is driving the need for a more flexible [...]
The post [Unleashing ML Innovation at Spotify with Ray](https://engineering.atspotify.c ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/02/unleashing-ml-innovation-at-spotify-with-ray/)
2023-02-15T13:57:34Z **Incident Report: Spotify Outage on January 14, 2023**
On January 14, between 00:15 UTC and 03:45 UTC, Spotify suffered an outage. The impact was small at first and increased over the course of an hour until most functionality (including playback) was not working. Spotify engineers were first notified of the problem at 00:40 UTC, and our incident response team was immediately assembled. Due [...]
The post [Incident Report: Spotify Outage on January 14, 2023](https://engineering ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/02/incident-report-spotify-outage-on-january-14-2023/)
2023-02-21T13:26:04Z **A Multi-Year Challenge: Repairing Deep Linking & Attribution at Spotify**
Deep linking and attribution are important functionalities for a growing business. Deep links seamlessly get you to the content you want in the app. Attribution helps us understand which activity (such as marketing or sharing) drives you to that content. At Spotify in 2017, these critical functionalities were in disrepair. But over the course of [...]
The post [A Multi-Year Challenge: ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/02/a-multi-year-challenge-repairing-deep-linking-attribution-at-spotify/)
2023-03-06T14:09:52Z **Getting More from Your Team Health Checks**
Watch Justin and Fiona speak about ‘Team Health Checks — One Size Does Not Fit All’ at the Spotify Engineering Conference in 2022. Spotify has for a long time run squad health checks. Squads step back from their day-to-day activities to get a broader perspective on how they are working, with the aim of improving [...]
The post [Getting More from Your Team Health Checks](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/03/getting-more-from-your-team-he ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/03/getting-more-from-your-team-health-checks/)
2023-03-15T18:57:43Z **Encore x Accessibility: A Balancing Act**
On the Encore team (Spotify’s design system), there’s nothing we love more than collaborating with our fellow squads — (1) because they have awesome squad names and (2) because they have awesome people. Enter our most recent collab with the Mandalorian squad, which is in charge of accessibility at Spotify — and aptly named, because [...]
The post [Encore x Accessibility: A Balancing Act](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/03/encore-x-accessib ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/03/encore-x-accessibility-a-balancing-act/)
2023-03-21T17:17:36Z **Choosing Sequential Testing Framework — Comparisons and Discussions**
TL;DR Sequential tests are the bread and butter for any company conducting online experiments. The literature on sequential testing has developed quickly over the last 10 years, and it’s not always easy to determine which test is most suitable for the setup of your company — many of these tests are “optimal” in some sense, [...]
The post [Choosing Sequential Testing Framework — Comparisons an ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/03/choosing-sequential-testing-framework-comparisons-and-discussions/)
2023-03-31T18:07:47Z **Load Testing for 2022 Wrapped**
Overview Wrapped is Spotify’s global annual year-end campaign that celebrates our listeners with a personalized review of their listening habits over the past year. Last year, with more than 150 million unique engaged users across more than 111 markets, the Wrapped engineering team had the extraordinary challenge of supporting traffic across many regions and from [...]
The post [Load Testing for 2022 Wrapped](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/03/load-testing-f ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/03/load-testing-for-2022-wrapped/)
2023-04-13T15:58:13Z **Large-Scale Generation of ML Podcast Previews at Spotify with Google Dataflow**
Integrating the Podz ML pipeline into Spotify As of March 8, 2023, Spotify has started serving short previews for music, podcasts, and audiobooks on the home feed. (You can see the announcement at Stream On on YouTube, starting at 19:15.) This is a huge lift for in-app content discovery — a move away from making [...]
The post [Large-Scale Generation of ML Podcast Previe ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/04/large-scale-generation-of-ml-podcast-previews-at-spotify-with-google-dataflow/)
2023-04-18T00:09:06Z **Spotify’s Shift to a Fleet-First Mindset (Part 1)**
TL;DR Instead of performing 10 major software upgrades to our infrastructure every year, what if we did 10,000 small ones? Across our entire codebase? That’s the idea behind Fleet Management: by building automation tools that can safely make changes to thousands of repos at once, we can maintain the health of our tech infrastructure continuously [...]
The post [Spotify’s Shift to a Fleet-First Mindset (Part 1)](https://engineeri ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/04/spotifys-shift-to-a-fleet-first-mindset-part-1/)
2023-04-27T12:58:10Z **Humans + Machines: A Look Behind Spotify’s Algotorial Playlists**
TL;DR Since 2017, Spotify has been working to create a better listening experience for our users by applying the expertise of our curators with algorithmic personalization. The outcome of these efforts has resulted in what we call “Algotorial” playlists. The best of both worlds: Editorial and Algorithms Spotify has a library of playlists for almost [...]
The post [Humans + Machines: A Look Behind Spot ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/04/humans-machines-a-look-behind-spotifys-algotorial-playlists/)
2023-05-03T19:56:30Z **Fleet Management at Spotify (Part 2): The Path to Declarative Infrastructure**
Check out Part 1 of our series on Fleet Management at Spotify and how we manage our software at scale. At Spotify, we adopted the declarative infrastructure paradigm to evolve our infrastructure platform’s configuration management and control plane approach, allowing us to manage hundreds of thousands of cloud resources across tens of thousands of different [...]
The post [F ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/05/fleet-management-at-spotify-part-2-the-path-to-declarative-infrastructure/)
2023-05-10T14:33:47Z **TV Spatial Navigation**
Introduction Very often, when developing user interfaces, a lot of focus is given to the visuals, as that’s what primarily gets a user’s attention. However, other aspects are equally impactful for making the experience great but can be overlooked, like the user’s input – how the user interacts with the app. It is completely understandable [...]
The post [TV Spatial Navigation ](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/05/tv-spatial-navigation/) appeared first on [Sp ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/05/tv-spatial-navigation/)
2023-05-15T20:06:19Z **Fleet Management at Spotify (Part 3): Fleet-wide Refactoring**
Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of our series on Fleet Management at Spotify and how we manage our software at scale. For the third part of this Fleet Management series, we’ll discuss what we call “fleet-wide refactoring” of code across thousands of Git repos: the tools we’ve built to enable fleet-wide refactoring and [...]
The post [Fleet Management at Spotify (Part 3): Fleet-wide Refactoring](https://enginee ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/05/fleet-management-at-spotify-part-3-fleet-wide-refactoring/)
2023-05-25T13:39:27Z **Multiple Layers of Abstraction in Design Systems**
Check out our previous post — Customization & Configuration in Design Systems — for more about how we define APIs for design systems. The previous post on this topic explored two common paths that emerge in APIs — customization and configuration — each with its own pros and cons. Customization provides freedom and speed, while [...]
The post [Multiple Layers of Abstraction in Design Systems](https://engineering.atspotify.com/20 ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/05/multiple-layers-of-abstraction-in-design-systems/)
2023-06-15T12:38:05Z **Experimenting at Scale, the Spotify Home Way**
Introduction In the fast-paced world of streaming, personalization plays a vital role in enhancing user experiences. At Spotify, our Home serves as a personalized surface where users retrieve familiar content and discover new content tailored to their preferences. We are constantly trying to optimize the Home experience to provide more value to our users; however, [...]
The post [Experimenting at Scale, the Spotify Home Way](https://eng ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/06/experimenting-at-scale-the-spotify-home-way/)
2023-06-22T13:48:29Z **Analyzing Volatile Memory on a Google Kubernetes Engine Node**
TL:DR At Spotify, we run containerized workloads in production across our entire organization in five regions where our main production workloads are in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). If we detect suspicious behavior in our workloads, we need to be able to quickly analyze it and determine if something malicious has [...]
The post [Analyzing Volatile Memory on a Google Kube ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/06/analyzing-volatile-memory-on-a-google-kubernetes-engine-node/)
2023-06-28T15:20:53Z **Experimenting with Machine Learning to Target In-App Messaging**
Messaging at Spotify At Spotify, we use messaging to communicate with our listeners all over the world. Our Messaging team powers and creates delightful foreground and background communications across the Spotify experience, experimenting with and tailoring the perfect journey for each user across our platform. Today we are able to send messages through WhatsApp, SMS, [...]
The post [Experimenting wi ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/06/experimenting-with-machine-learning-to-target-in-app-messaging/)
2023-07-18T22:07:14Z **Bringing Sequential Testing to Experiments with Longitudinal Data (Part 1): The Peeking Problem 2.0**
Spotify’s approach to challenges in sequential testing with longitudinal data At Spotify, we’re constantly improving our data infrastructure, which means we can get feedback on experiments earlier and earlier. To allow for early feedback in a risk-managed manner, we use sequential tests to monitor regressions in the experiments. H ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/07/bringing-sequential-testing-to-experiments-with-longitudinal-data-part-1-the-peeking-problem-2-0/)
2023-07-25T14:29:19Z **Bringing Sequential Testing to Experiments with Longitudinal Data (Part 2): Sequential Testing**
In Part 1 of this series, we introduced the within-unit peeking problem that we call the “peeking problem 2.0”. We showed that moving from single to multiple observations per unit in analyses of experiments introduces new challenges and pitfalls with regards to sequential testing. We discussed the importance of being clear about the distinct ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/07/bringing-sequential-testing-to-experiments-with-longitudinal-data-part-2-sequential-testing/)
2023-08-03T12:00:00Z **Coming Soon: Confidence — An Experimentation Platform from Spotify**
TL;DR: Spotify is releasing a new commercial product for software development teams: a version of our homegrown experimentation platform that we’re calling Confidence. Based on everything we’ve learned over the last 10+ years about what it takes to enable experimentation at scale, the platform makes it easy for teams to set up, run, coordinate, and [...]
The post [Coming Soon: Confidence — An Ex ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/08/coming-soon-confidence-an-experimentation-platform-from-spotify/)
2023-08-16T20:14:42Z **Experimentation at Spotify: Three Lessons for Maximizing Impact in Innovation**
As companies mature, it’s easy to believe that the core experience and most user needs have been resolved, and all that’s left to work toward are the marginal benefits, the cherries on top. Cherries on top might add delight and panache, but they rarely cause fundamental shifts in performance and success. And as a business, [...]
The post [Experimentation at Spotify: Three ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/08/experimentation-at-spotify-three-lessons-for-maximizing-impact-in-innovation/)
2023-08-24T17:44:29Z **Encouragement Designs and Instrumental Variables for A/B Testing**
At Spotify, we run a lot of A/B tests. Most of these tests follow a standard design, where we assign users randomly to control and treatment groups, and then observe the difference in outcomes between these two groups. Usually, the control group, also known as the “holdout” group, retains the current experience, while the treatment [...]
The post [Encouragement Designs and Instrumental Variables ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/08/encouragement-designs-and-instrumental-variables-for-a-b-testing/)
2023-09-28T15:36:10Z **How to Accurately Test Significance with Difference in Difference Models**
When we want to determine the causal effect of a product or business change at Spotify, A/B testing is the gold standard. However, in some cases, it’s not possible to run A/B tests. For example, when the intervention is an exogenous shock we can’t control, such as the COVID pandemic. Or when using experimental control [...]
The post [How to Accurately Test Significance with Differ ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/09/how-to-accurately-test-significance-with-difference-in-difference-models/)
2023-10-05T13:01:27Z **Managing Software at Scale: Kelsey Hightower Talks with Niklas Gustavsson about Fleet Management**
How does Spotify manage a sprawling tech ecosystem made up of 500+ squads managing over 10,000 software components in production? Last November, Google Cloud distinguished engineer Kelsey Hightower met with Spotify chief architect Niklas Gustavsson at Spotify’s office in Gothenburg, Sweden, to talk about just that. Wa ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/10/managing-software-at-scale-googles-kelsey-hightower-talks-with-spotifys-niklas-gustavsson-about-fleet-management/)
2023-10-17T13:31:03Z **Switching Build Systems, Seamlessly**
At Spotify, we have experimented with the Bazel build system since 2017. Over the years, the project has matured, and support for more languages and ecosystems have been added, thanks to the open source community and its maintainers at Google. In 2020, it became clear that the future of our client development required a unified [...]
The post [Switching Build Systems, Seamlessly](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/10/switching-build-systems-seamless ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/10/switching-build-systems-seamlessly/)
2023-10-20T14:33:03Z **Exclude from Your Taste Profile**
What is “Exclude from your taste profile”? Are you a parent forced to put the Bluey theme song on repeat? Do you work from home and play lofi beats or ambient piano music? Do you fall asleep to peaceful ambient noises? Are you bummed out when these songs come up as your most listened to [...]
The post [Exclude from Your Taste Profile](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/10/exclude-from-your-taste-profile/) appeared first on [Spotify Engineering](https://engi ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/10/exclude-from-your-taste-profile/)
2023-10-23T13:59:20Z **Announcing the Recipients of the 2023 Spotify FOSS Fund**
TL;DR It’s back! Last year, we created the Spotify FOSS Fund to help support the free and open source software projects we use at Spotify. We’re excited to announce that the fund has returned for 2023, and the recipients have been selected. This year, the fund’s 100,000 EUR are going to the following four projects: [...]
The post [Announcing the Recipients of the 2023 Spotify FOSS Fund](https://engineering.atspoti ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/10/announcing-the-recipients-of-the-2023-spotify-foss-fund/)
2023-10-25T19:50:55Z **Introducing Voyager: Spotify’s New Nearest-Neighbor Search Library**
For the past decade, Spotify has used approximate nearest-neighbor search technology to power our personalization, recommendation, and search systems. These technologies allow engineers and researchers to build systems that recommend similar items (like similar tracks, artists, or albums) without needing to run slow and expensive machine learning algorithms in real time. Spotify led the pack [.. ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/10/introducing-voyager-spotifys-new-nearest-neighbor-search-library/)
2023-11-07T02:35:39Z **How We Automated Content Marketing to Acquire Users at Scale**
Spotify runs paid marketing campaigns across the globe on various digital ad platforms like Facebook, Google UAC (display banners), TikTok, and more. Being efficient with our marketing budget is critical for maximizing the return on ad spend so that we can continue to develop ads that communicate the value of Spotify to users and non-users alike.
The post [How We Automated Content Marketing to Acquire Us ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/11/how-we-automated-content-marketing-to-acquire-users-at-scale/)
2023-11-08T17:13:57Z **Spotify Wins CNCF Top End User Award for the Second Time!**
This week at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Chicago, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced that Spotify won their Top End User Award.
The post [Spotify Wins CNCF Top End User Award for the Second Time!](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/11/spotify-wins-cncf-top-end-user-award-for-the-second-time/) appeared first on [Spotify Engineering](https://engineering.atspotify.com). ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/11/spotify-wins-cncf-top-end-user-award-for-the-second-time/)
2023-11-14T13:49:28Z **The What, Why, and How of Mastering App Size**
Sometimes a shiny new feature brings more harm than good. The reason is simple — application size. Any addition to the application — be it code for a new feature, an image resource for a new button or even support for a new localization — contributes to the increase of the application’s size.
The post [The What, Why, and How of Mastering App Size](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/11/the-what-why-and-how-of-mastering-app-size/) appe ... ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/11/the-what-why-and-how-of-mastering-app-size/)
2023-12-05T17:12:21Z **Recursive Embedding and Clustering**
Large sets of diverse data present several challenges for clustering, but through a novel approach that combines dimensionality reduction, recursion, and supervised machine learning, we’ve been able to obtain strong results.
The post [Recursive Embedding and Clustering](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/12/recursive-embedding-and-clustering/) appeared first on [Spotify Engineering](https://engineering.atspotify.com). ⌘ [Read more](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/12/recursive-embedding-and-clustering/)