engblogs

Story Hack Boston Recap: a multi-disciplinary hackathon at the MIT Media Lab where about 50 participants built storytelling tech demos, including SoundStep, a geolocation-driven iOS app, and Story Prompter, an API-powered web app for recording stories from headlines, highlighting collaboration and sponsor support from P2PU and Mashery.

Recap of a hackathon event called Story Hack Boston that brought together 50 people from content and technical backgrounds to collaborate on creating new storytelling experiences.

A technical update detailing new App Gallery evaluation criteria, proactive outreach to developers, and plans to rebuild with Next SoundCloud to improve content attribution and discovery for SoundCloud users.

Overview of the updated App Gallery policy and roadmap, detailing app inclusion criteria, proactive outreach, and the plan to rebuild the Gallery alongside Next SoundCloud to improve attribution and discovery for developers.

Details about the changes being made to the App Gallery and how they will affect the developer community.

A concise retrospective on SoundCloud’s architectural evolution, showing how scalable growth was achieved through asynchronous, decoupled components, strategic caching, and clear integration points that migrated from a simple Apache/Nginx stack to a distributed backend architecture.

A concise account of how SoundCloud evolved its architecture to scale from thousands to hundreds of millions of users by embracing asynchronous processing, decoupled components, queues, and well-defined integration points.

A hackathon-born, Arduino-powered sensor toy that runs on a Raspberry Pi to download and play SoundCloud sounds in response to physical events, orchestrated via ZeroMQ and a Sinatra web app.

ToyBox, a hackathon-built, SoundCloud-powered children's toy that uses Arduino sensors and a Raspberry Pi to download, store, and play SoundCloud sounds in response to physical events, coordinated through 0MQ and a lightweight Sinatra webapp.

Adapting SoundCloud's architecture to accommodate growth and scaling challenges

Creating a children's toy powered by SoundCloud

Outage post-mortem detailing how unintended iptables and kmod auto-loading triggered nf_conntrack activation and conntrack-table exhaustion, exposing risks of kernel module loading and netfilter interactions in production systems.