NerdOut@Spotify
Episodes
34: Redesigning our Apple TV App *Release Notes*
05 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What does it take to ship a video-first Spotify experience on the biggest screen in your house?In this Release Notes episode of the NerdOut@Spotify po...
33: Ship Happens (When Agents Code)
15 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
At Spotify, we're doubling down on background coding agents. The goal is to scale code migrations and boost developer productivity beyond our exis...
32: ARM-ing ourselves with Google Axion, Part 2
19 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In part two of ARM-ing ourselves with Google Axion, Dave is joined by Max Charas, a senior staff engineer at Spotify who’s been leading much of the ...
31: ARM-ing ourselves with Google Axion, Part 1
08 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Spotify is in the middle of a big shift in modern computing: moving from x86 processors to Google’s new ARM-based Axion chips. This isn’t just a h...
30: Building AiKA: Spotify’s AI Knowledge Assistant
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Hear about the journey behind building Spotify’s AI knowledge assistant, aka AiKA — from hack projects to internal chatbot, to enterprise develope...
29: Deploying Our New Typeface: Spotify Mix
03 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Last year Spotify launched a big update to the app: a new typeface. For most of us, changing fonts is easy. It’s just a dropdown menu away. But cre...
28: The CNCF Turns 10
06 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ever heard of Kubernetes? Envoy? Prometheus? You probably have. But what you may not know is that these projects are managed and sustained by the Clou...
Join us for Wizards, Portals, and Spotify for Backstage
19 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Register for Spotify’s roadmap webinar on April 30, 2024 — and see what’s coming next from Spotify for Backstage, the open source platform for b...
27: Measuring Developer Productivity
18 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky talks with Kyle Buttner, a product manager on Spotify’s insights team, to discuss Spotify's journey i...
26: A Trillion Events
08 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How did we learn to do event delivery at scale at Spotify? It’s been a journey. When you do something like tap the play button in the Spotify app, t...
25: Voice Translation *Release Notes*
11 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We’ve seen generative AI and large language models do some amazing things in the past year — but how do you go from a tech demo to a real shipping...
24: Tesla *Release Notes*
09 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Over the summer, Spotify helped Tesla engineers ship a major update to their built-in media player. In this Release Notes episode, host Dave Zolotusky...
23: Searching for Neighbors with Voyager
19 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How do you get a machine to find a song that’s similar to another song? What properties of the song should it look for? And then does it just compar...
22: Declarative Infra and Beyond
24 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the very old days, if you needed more storage for your database, you had to walk into the data center and install another server. Now you can just ...
21: The Man Who Killed ABBA
03 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Last episode, we talked about ABBA, our first A/B testing tool. We used it to test UI changes, new features, content recommendations — anything and ...
20: The Rise and Fall of ABBA
22 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Back in the day, Spotify built a custom A/B testing tool called ABBA. It was great. The platform enabled lots of teams to try out lots of ideas for ne...
19: Engineering for Accessibility
01 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We’re often focused on features that improve the experience for users — letting them do something better, faster, smarter. But if you don’t cons...
18: Meet Your Personal AI DJ
04 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How do you make an AI-generated voice feel more like a real person? You give it a real personality. Spotify recently released a new feature in the US ...
17: Building Apps at Spotify Scale
16 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What happens when the standard tooling for iOS and Android just doesn't cut it anymore? What’s it like to maintain an app when there are literally t...
16: Backstage Adopters Speak
23 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Whether you’re working at a major financial institution or an audio streaming platform, it turns out engineering teams face a lot of the same challe...
15: Your Very Own Developer Advocate
02 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
There are thousands of developers building great Spotify experiences — who don’t actually work at Spotify. From smart speakers to game consoles to...
14: For Love and Money?
12 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From Norway to Nebraska, there are individual developers keeping the open source projects that we all depend on going. Last year, Spotify started an a...
13: Advent of Code Live!
15 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Recorded live at midnight EST, December 6, 2022, from Boston, Gothenburg, and Stockholm, via the Spotify Live app. In this special Advent of Code epis...
12: Fleet First
17 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Instead of performing 10 big software upgrades to our infrastructure every year, what if we did 10,000 small ones, in all our repos, all at once? That...
11: Open Source Work Is Work
27 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If you look at any of our open source projects, you’re bound to see the phrase “Made with 💚 at Spotify.” That’s because many open source pr...
10: Basic Pitch
06 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What if you could create a guitar solo just by humming it? That’s Basic Pitch, a new open source project from Spotify’s Audio Intelligence Lab. Ba...
09: It's All About the Data
15 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In technology, as in life, bad experiences often start with bad data. This is as true with a misguided aunt setting you up on a blind date as it is wi...
08: Humans in the Loop
25 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Get ready: we’re diving into machine learning. Hear how we’re improving personalization with reinforcement learning (RL), what makes ML engineerin...
07: *Bonus!* Kelsey on How to Give a Great Talk
11 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this special bonus episode, Google’s Kelsey Hightower is back to tell us what separates a good talk from a great one, the importance of storytell...
07: Kelsey Hightower on Engineering Culture
04 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The one and only Kelsey Hightower drops by the recording studios at Spotify’s global HQ in Stockholm to chat with host Dave Zolotusky about what it’...
06: Bits of Math at Scale
28 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Our Audio Intelligence Lab built the world’s beefiest effects pedal using machine learning and Python. Say hello to Pedalboard, an open source frame...
05: Advent of Code
07 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What do coders do when they’re not coding for work? Sometimes they code for fun. (And sometimes they code for fun at work.) Hear why every December ...
04: Backstage in the Wild
16 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Spotify believes open source is one way big tech companies and the wider developer community can solve big tech problems together. So how’s that goi...
03: Community Builders
03 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Open source has become an essential part of software development, for both individuals and companies. Hear from Spotify engineers about what it’s li...
02: Open Issues
08 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Backstage, Spotify’s homegrown developer portal, has become the most ambitious open source project in the company’s history. But for many on the t...
01: What is Backstage?
07 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Spotify has thousands of developers managing tens of thousands of software components. How do you even begin to manage all that complexity? If you’r...
00: Introducing NerdOut@Spotify
04 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A tech podcast produced by the nerds at Spotify, made for the nerds inside all of us. We’ll try to find the answer to questions big and small, like:...