QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.

Presentation: "Applying Evolutionary Architecture on Popular API"

Track: Distributed Systems / REST / Time: Wednesday 15:40 - 16:30 / Location: Fleming Room

SoundCloud is the biggest repository of audio content on the web, with more than 25 million users, from the BBC and Al Jazeera to Skrillex and Radiohead. Since its inception, the SoundCloud platform has provided third-party developers with a HTTP API; and people have used it to build everything from professional recording studio integrations to fun hacks.

Recently we decided to make the API the heart of everything, changing our main website and all other apps to be API clients. This required a deep change in how we do things, splitting our once monolithic Ruby on Rails application into a network of collaborating services, and requiring a complete overhaul of our resources and representations —all this while still supporting internal and external users using the old API.

In this talk let's explore the techniques and technologies we used and developed in order to replace the engines mid-flight while not compromising on our core engineering practices and API design and usability philosophy.

Phil Calcado, Soundcloud

Phil Calcado

Biography: Phil Calcado

Phil Calçado is a Director of Engineering at SoundCloud, where he writes code and helps teams build a scalable and maintainable service. Before moving to Berlin, he spent four years as a Lead Consultant for ThoughtWorks, where he helped clients build systems in whatever crazy stack they had decided to use.

Twitter: @pcalcado
Blog: philcalcado.com