A Tech Company I Love: Spotify

A Tech Company I Love: Spotify

A prompt from Hashnode Bootcamp, Day 4

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4 min read

I guess you could see it coming after the example I used in my previous post... I love using Spotify. I've been a user since 2012 before it became mainstream ๐Ÿ’๐Ÿผโ€โ™€๏ธ I've watched it grow, while my love for its features also kept growing. And when I love a product, I usually would also love to contribute to that product! Especially if there is a great company behind it.

I don't think Spotify needs any introductions as a product, as it currently is the most used streaming service for music and podcasts in the world. As a company, here are some things that make it great!

A great company as well as a great product

  • They care about diversity, equity and impact. Today I attended a virtual conference by Spotify, Raising the Volume, dedicated to women and non-binary people interested in working in the tech-music industry. It was amazing: I did a lot of networking, and the event inspired me to write this article.
  • The Work From Anywhere policy: despite not being a fully remote company and having amazing offices, for most positions you can also choose to work from wherever you like within the required time zones.
  • It's definitely a global company spread all over the world, but it was born in Sweden, and it has a European heart. Big tech companies and startups always seem to be born in the US only, but well, no! This makes me proud as a European citizen myself, and of course, it marks a big opportunity in the "old" continent.
  • They offer summer internships and many other entry-level opportunities for students! Sadly (but not really ๐Ÿ˜ฌ), I've just finished studying last summer, so I've missed my chance for the moment. But it sounds like a very cool program and I would recommend it to anyone interested in tech and music.
  • The average age of employees is 34. Who doesn't love being in a young environment while you're young as well! And as successful as Spotify is, I feel like it does still have a startup heart.
  • Controlled chaos? I'm all in for that.

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What do they do as a (tech) company?

  • Curated playlists! I loooove playlists. But well, let's talk about the tech.
  • Engineering: many different technologies are used across tech teams to create products and services. They also have a dedicated blog, so yay, there is some technical writing as well!
  • Data, Research and Insights: my dream job would probably be in this area. I have a thing for over-analyzing stuff ๐Ÿง and when stuff is music-related โ”€ take me, I'm all yours. There is also a Spotify Research blog, where you can read more about the topics they do research on as well as their papers.
  • Design: I'm not an expert in this field, but I think that the design and user experience on Spotify slay. It would be hard to reach such success without that, after all. And guess what, there is yet another blog for design!
  • Spotify gives great support to external developers that want to build integrations or other tools connected with their product. The documentation seems quite extensive... But I'll check that first-hand as soon as I start my own project using Spotify APIs ๐Ÿคฉ
  • They also release some open source software. The documentation for the main projects here is thorough as well. In particular, I've read a bit about Backstage, which is now hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Looks like such a powerful tool!

Conclusion

I hope I've made you a bit more aware of the company behind the product. Do you also use Spotify as a streaming service? Have you ever developed something with its APIs, or would you like to try that out? Please let me know in the comments! And by the way, thanks for reading ๐Ÿ˜Š

That's it: my love song for Spotify is over... for now. I can't wait to do some data analysis on my own user data. And to document it all here on Hashnode, of course!

Photo credits

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