With the beginning of this new year I’m not a SoundClouder anymore.

I joined SoundCloud as an intern and freelancer over three years ago when I was still a Bachelor student. After graduating I started full time, working on the API and the website, making client developers and users happy every day. On the side I ran TracksOnAMap, TakesQuestions and SoundCloud Labs, attended many MusicHackDays and organized the Berlin one.

It’s been an incredible time. The best thing was to work with such an incredibly smart team. Every morning I woke up full of excitement to see what this best-team-in-the-world is going to create today. The time at the cloud was my coming-of-age as a developer and team worker. Beneath all the practical skills I’ve improved like writing maintainable code, designing a clean product and communicating effectively, I learned how effective one can be with the right motivation and supportive structure. And how much fun being “in the game” can be.

Working at SoundCloud is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I’m proud and grateful that I was able to participate. The SoundCloud story has been incredible so far and it is far from finished. It will be even more disruptive the next year than ever before and already started with a bang. If you are searching for an amazing job, check these kick-ass open positions …

And what am I going to do now? I want to broaden my horizons. I will attend some university courses. I will hack useless and/or nice stuff. I will try to find out what next I can bring to the world. If you know something, contact me now!

I’m full of excitement and respect for the time to come. It’s gonna be interesting.

Sounds are here. Pictures are here and here.

I returned from my several-weeks trip to India. Everything went fine.

When people ask me how it was I have to shrug. The trip was way to multifaceted to be put into easy words. One thing that is for sure is that it was not a holiday but an experience. And this is not meant in a spiritual sense but in broaden ones horizons by going through a challenging environment. I’ve found India to be a country that doesn’t make it easy to be liked. There were too many things problematic for me like high structural poverty, disfunct garbage disposal, dangerous traffic, trickery in business and a general lack of quality. I tried not to judge but only observe, but it became hard when being confronted with a big pile of things that just don’t make sense to me. I tried to understand and I’m sure I succeeded to a certain degree. Still it was a fierce realization that we probably do some things objectively better in the Western World.

We had not prepared the trip much. No big upfront investigations about the country, people, history or the route to take. We spoke to some friends who’ve been there before but mostly we just let India come at us. We decided on the spot where to go next and gathered information on the way like from our guide book, the internet or speaking to locals and other travelers.

As we went along our opinions swung free between being amazed and appalled. A great day turned into a nightmare within minutes and vice versa. We also switched often between “Real” and “Western Tourist” India. They felt fundamentally different, with the later supplying a level of infrastructure geared to tourist that was not existing in the former (like international food or western music).

During the trip I took a lot of pictures and audio recordings. I noticed is that in them India looks far better than in the memories I have of it. It is just way easier to record nice things but spare the bad.

You can listen to the audio recordings here and view pictures (with descriptions) here. Also, we kept track of our trip in the Lonely Planet’s Thron Tree Forum here (mirror here). It includes how we traveled, where we stayed and what we’ve seen in glorious detail. Of course I’m happy to talk more about the trip. Chat me up!

Update: I’ve added more pictures here

The next two months I will leave the online world and indulge myself in traveling through India. I take a light backpack, a good friend and no expectations with me. It will probably be super exciting.

Sadly I will not share this experience online, since I’m just not taking devices with me to do so. I will also likely not respond to your emails. Keep calm and try again after November 14th 2011.

In the mean time you can watch SoundCloud accelerate to uber-lightspeed, attend amazing Music Hack Days and watch Tim Exile giving online jams and TEDx talks.

Last week I attended Music Hack Day Barcelona. This is a write-up of my experience.

If you do not know Music Hack Day (MHD) yet: It’s a two-days event where programmers, designers and artists meet to build prototypes for the future of music. I have attended several of them in the past and organized the one in Berlin a month ago (which still deserves it’s own post …). Watch this video from MHD New York to get an impression.

The MHD in Barcelona was the second one there; I did a write-up of the first one half a year ago here. The recent one was held in connection with the Sonar Festival. On the one hand this was amazing (Hello Nicolas Jaar & Four Tet, press, awesome people already on site to chat with). On the other hand it was pretty noisy and hectic, people just randomly dropped-by and it was easy to get distracted by the festival. To give you an impression, watch this video of me walking from the hack space to the exit:

On a personal level I think that a Hack Day at a festival can be a pleasant change. On a professional level I prefer relaxed but focused Hack Days more. There is already a lot of stuff going on anyways and adding more distraction drains energy from the MHD core of hacking and socializing.

My Hack Potty Mouth Band

Which band has the dirtier lyrics? Let your favorite bands fight. Enter two band names and we will fetch their lyrics from MusixMatch and send them through the sentiment analysis by MusicMetric. The band with the pottier mouth wins.


I wanted to work with other APIs a bit and figured that this is a funny little idea. When working on it I realized that this can be done frontend-only. So I dived into CORS a bit and built the site with jQuery. @por helped me with the design, thanks for that.

Big advantage of living backend-less is that hosting it becomes dead-easy. My hack is deployed currently on GitHub Pages, just like Robb loves to do it

In the end the hack won me the MusicMetric prize, which is a pair of amazing Sennheiser HD 25-1 || headphones. Yay, they will be used a lot!

One hack that really pushed boundaries is JS Mad by Amos from official.fm. It is a pure Javascript MP3 decoder that uses the Web Audio API of Firefox or Chrome to output sound. No flash, no audio tag. The internet is excited about this and so are we. Let’s hope this turns into a stable audio playback tool with sane CPU consumption.

There were a lot of other great hacks, have a look at the list here.

SoundCloud was a fairly large group with eight people on the Hack Day. We are very committed to Music Hack Days, send a lot of people and I’m always a bit afraid of us dominating the hack day with presence. But it turns out that we are actually a humble, nice-to-be-around bunch of interesting people that doesn’t just preach the SoundCloud gospel. At least this is the feedback I got from others. And for us it is very nice to be able to help others with their hacks but also to learn from them and engage in interesting conversations about everything.

After the Music Hack Day was finished, we started our week-end journey through Sonar-ish Barcelona, which lead me to seeing a protest camp, party in a fancy villa on the hill side and an abandoned theatre, breakfast on a lake in a park, swimming in the ocean, party on a hotel roof, dinner in a medieval backyard, party on a beach and in a basement, an early-morning bike ride and spanish breakfast. And a lot of great sound to make me very happy.

On the way home I was sure that there is probably no better company I could work at, with amazing people that perfectly align with the way I want to live my life.

T̩l̩popmusik РBreathe

When I played a gig a month ago, I was overly excited, maybe even a bit frantic. Just before I went on stage, the sound engineer of the night noticed and told me: “Don’t forget to breathe. That’s the most important thing.” So I did and the gig was awesome. Since then, I like to stop … and breathe. I give myself 10 seconds to focus. It helps in tense situations. And it feels good to do this with full awareness. It creates a feeling for the current situation and channels concentration.

Another thing I like to do is giving names to things. Especially days, weeks and months should have a motto. With this I try to figure out, what is important and remind me of it. This month, I breathe. After traveling and stress I want to regenerate, give myself space and time. Yoga, good food and parties. Concentrated work and laid-back leisure. And ever day I listen to “Breathe” by Télépopmusik. To remind me what month this is.

Now, two years later I work full-time at SoundCloud and don’t play in a band anymore. But today I discovered, by accident, that Mugison uploaded a lot of his music to SoundCloud. Many songs are free for download. And he even has a premium account. I hope he takes the discount code I’ve sent him so that he keeps using SoundCloud. This is the song that he played when my guitar got smashed:

I like that things constantly change and come and go. But it is also comfortable to know that things come back and that this life is going in big circles. I am super excited about what the future has to unveil …

Appart from the fact that ‘Practise is everything’ this taught me that speed is not achieved by doing it as fast as possible but by practising quality. Speed is a by-product of quality work and a lot of practise.

Currently I’m experiencing this exact phonemena again. I have to find my way around in a big new codebase and by the way learn Ruby and Rails. I discover new exciting and new bugging things every day. And programming a feature or fix a bug takes me ages.

I focus a lot on doing it in the optimal way. Code quality is nothing to compromise on. And the great thing is that I can already see and feel how I get faster with it. Not by ‘getting it done asap’ but by really understanding what I’m doing. It feels good to work that way.

P.S. Code reviews are awesome!

Today marks two major turnarounds in my life.

Today I have handed in my Bachelor’s thesis. This means my Bachelor studies are finished now. Good bye university. We might meet again for a Master’s degree someday …

Also today I have signed a contract with SoundCloud. This means that starting in September I will be an API developer there.

Both are big news. I’m going to write more about each of them in the following days. But for now I am off celebrating!

]]> http://www.freenerd.de/archives/2010/1326/feed/ 0 http://www.freenerd.de/archives/2010/1244/ http://www.freenerd.de/archives/2010/1244/#comments Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:14:22 +0000 Johan http://www.freenerd.de/?p=1244

I am currently sitting in a cottage in the woods some kilometers east of the town Hazyview in East South Africa. The 3G network is more stable and faster than I have ever experienced it in germany.

In South Africa the summer has just ended and autumn has broken, which means that it is not getting warmer than 30°C … good for us. Furthermore it is raining every now and then cooling down the air even more.

We arrived here yesterday in the night, after a 2-days-1-night travel from Berlin to Doha/Katar to Johannesburg. We fetched our cars (decent mini-family-vans with an undersized engine, not in the above picture) and drove to our accomondation. Door to Door about 37 hours.

Today in the morning, we drove to a clinic in a rural part of South Africa. In these area the inhabitants are mostly poor, mostly black and often without a tap water connection at there home. It is one of these parts in the country where the legacy of Apartheid is visible a lot. A former ghetto that has not yet been reconnected.

The journey to the clinic led us first through a very touristic area where one high-prized hotel followed the next. We then took a well-built asphalt road driving north. We left that road for a dirt road as you can see it on the picture above. After a long time (which we mainly used for regretting not to have a 4×4 offroader) we arrived at the clinic.

The clinic is part of a SAP Research project where they test the usage of computer technology in the rural primary health system. After having a tour around, we started to deploy our system. We plugged our server into the local network and set-up terminal test computers.

Then we spoke with the hospital staff about their processes and their opinion on our system. The buglist piled up fast … but so did our understanding of how things work in the clinic.

One of the biggest issues for us during the tests was the language, because even though the people speak english, it is sometimes hard to understand them. Which is the same for them with us as well …

During our stay technicians showed up at the clinic to install a satellite dish for an internet connection. They have not succeeded yet in installing (“we have to cut down some tree branches, otherwise we cant see the satellite”) but they will hopefully do so tomorrow. This internet connection will allow us to maintain the system from germany and to get feedback on the usage of it.

We finished the day with driving to another clinic and having a talk with the staff about their processes and opinions.

On thing, that astonished me during this day, was how near first and third world are. From a shopping center of european standard to an area, where people walk on a sandy half-destroyed road carrying tapwater to there home in less than 20 minutes.

During the next days we will continue working in the clinic, finding out how we can introduce real-life meaning to our bachelor project (and eventually make some sort of scientific sense with this trip).

(read the second part of the report here)