SoundCloud was founded 13 years ago, and throughout its history, the company and much of its tech stack has changed. We started with a monolithic Ruby

Did I Break You? Reverse Dependency Verification

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2021-05-25 11:00:12

SoundCloud was founded 13 years ago, and throughout its history, the company and much of its tech stack has changed. We started with a monolithic Ruby on Rails app, and since then, have worked to extract, isolate, and reuse logic in many subsystems, and later on in separate microservices. We introduced different storage mechanisms and data analysis apps, and our frontend has also expanded from a single website to mobile apps, integrations with third parties, an Xbox app, and more recently, a full-fledged PWA to run on Chromebooks.

Internally, we’re committed to giving teams flexibility to pick whatever tools they deem best to solve the technological challenges of everyday product development. While this means a lot of autonomy, it also gradually led to a fragmented environment of languages, frameworks, processes, and documents, making cross-team collaboration and onboardability harder. We have, thus, moved into a model of providing sensible recommendations and supporting an opinionated tech stack.

In that sense, complexity became opt-in: In general, libraries, tooling, and the engineering experience should be as simple as possible with no configuration, but still provide the ability to support more complex use cases, depending on each problem-requirement set.