Spotify with Josh Brown

Josh Brown, Developer Advocate at Spotify, is on the podcast this week with your hosts Mark and Brian. Working in the Open Developer Platform department, Josh supports third-party developers as they create music experiences for users using the Spotify APIs and SDKs. The most popular of these, the Spotify Web API, lets developers access metadata about music and facilitates library management for users.

We talk later in the episode about the types of applications developers are creating using the Spotify Web API and how it’s changing the way people listen. Using developer feedback, Spotify has continued to improve on the API, now offering podcast support, for example. With the new podcast support, hobby developers especially are developing apps that make podcast listening easier and more social.

To create these open platform APIs, Josh tells us they relied heavily on Google Cloud products like GKE and Cloud Storage. To manage the GCP products they use, Spotify created an internal portal called Backstage. Independent developers are encouraged to make use of Backstage to help with their Spotify projects as well.

Josh wraps up the episode explaining the lessons learned in creating these APIs and how developer feedback became so important for them.

Josh Brown

Josh Brown is a developer advocate for Spotify, focusing on APIs. In his spare time, Josh enjoys running and writing.

Cool things of the week

• Google Cloud training available at no cost for 30 days blog
• Cost optimization for serverless workloads blog
• Understanding forwarding, peering, and private zones in Cloud DNS blog
  • Stephanie Wong’s video series on networking videos
  • Stephanie Wong’s blog on Medium blog

Interview

• Spotify site
• Backstage site
• Spotify for Developers site
• Spotify Community site
• Spotify Web API site
• Search, browse and follow podcasts using the new Podcast APIs news
• Kubernetes site
• GKE site
• Cloud SQL site
• Google Cloud Storage site
• Spotify Platform Documentation site
• Adopting Kubernetes with Spotify - Stack Chat video
• Updates on future Spotify events twitter

Question of the week

Podcasts and hosting static files: how does the GC Podcast do it? Cloud Storage of course! GC Podcast on GitHub.

What’s something cool you’re working on?

The Google Cloud livestreams we talked about a few weeks ago have expanded into a new Meetup group!