03: Community Builders

Open source has become an essential part of software development, for both individuals and companies. Hear from Spotify engineers about what it’s like to build products in the open, what they’ve learned from developing Backstage with hundreds of friendly, helpful Internet strangers, and how participating in a community helps you grow as an individual, too.

Host and Spotify principal engineer Dave Zolotusky talks with Emma Indal and Himanshu Mishra, two engineers who work on Backstage, the platform for building developer portals that Spotify open sourced in 2020. Like the rest of Spotify’s Backstage team, Emma got a crash course in working with a rapidly growing community and discovered just how fast new features can be built when you have contributors from all around the world joining in to help out. Himanshu was one of those early contributors, working on the project from the outside before turning his weekend obsessions and longtime interest in open source into a new job at Spotify. For both, the opportunity to build with the open source community has been a pivotal part of their journey as developers.

Learn more about Backstage and open source at Spotify:

• Listen to Episode 01: What is Backstage?
• Listen to Episode 02: Open Issues
• Watch the Backstage Explainer Video (2 mins.)
• Learn more at backstage.io
• Contribute to Backstage on GitHub
• Explore more open source projects from Spotify
• That xkcd comic
• Spotify joins the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF)

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

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