Wow I guess it was more than a year ago that I tweeted this. Crazy how time flies by. Anyway, here’s my rationale:

• When I update one line of code I feel like I have to put in a long explanation about its side effects, why it’s fully backwards compatible, and why it fixes some issue #xyz.
• When I refactor 500 lines of code, I get too lazy to write anything sensible, so I just put “refactoring FooBarController”. Note: don’t do at home!

For most people straight out of school, work life is a bit of a culture shock. For me it was an awesome experience, but a lot of the constraints were different and I had to learn to optimize for different things. It wasn’t necessarily the technology that I struggled with. The hardest part was how to manage my own projects and my time, as well as how to grow and make impact as an engineer. I’ve listed some of my biggest mistakes, which are also mistakes I see other (mostly junior) engineers make.

Febrary 6 was my last day at Spotify. In total I spent more than six years at Spotify and it was an amazing experience.

I joined Spotify in Stockholm in 2008, mainly because a bunch of friends from programming competitions had joined already. Their goal to change music consumption seemed ridiculous at that point, but six years later I think it’s safe to say they actually succeeded.

I was talking with some data engineers at Spotify and had a moment of nostalgia.

2008

I was writing my master’s thesis at Spotify and had to run a Hadoop job to extract some data from the logs. Every time I started running the job, I kept hearing this subtle noise. I kept noticing the correlation for a few days but I was too intimidated to ask. Finally people starting cursing that their machines had gotten really slow lately and I realized we were running Hadoop on the developer’s desktop machines. No one had told me. I think back then we had only GB’s of log data. I remember running less on the log and I would recognize half the usernames because they were my friends.

More Luigi presentations!