Spotify Labs is our home for research previews, experimental features, and early-stage products at the frontier of AI, audio, and creativity. Get a first listen and help shape what comes next.
Visit labs.spotify.com → On Hacker News Jun 2013 – Feb 2020
Infrastructure & DevOps 2Web & Frontend 1Systems & Performance 1Security & Privacy 1Networking & Internet 1Life, Learning & Writing 1
Spotify supports unicode usernames which we are a bit proud of (not many services allow you to have ☃, the unicode snowman, as a username). However, it has also been a reliable source of pain over the years. This is the story of one time when it bit us pretty badly and how we spent Easter dealing with it.
We like experimenting with geeky tools. All in the name of science of course…
Whenever a user performs an action in the Spotify client—such as listening to a song or searching for an artist—a small piece of information, an event, is sent to our servers. Event delivery, the process of making sure that all events gets transported safely from clients all over the world to our central processing…
The purpose of this post is to tell the story of the new Spotify web player. How and why it came to be. We will focus on what the steps were that led to a complete rewrite and how the lessons learned influenced the experience and the tech decisions of the .