Findspire is a artistic content discovery platform. Its main service is a music and video streaming service, quite similar to Spotify or Deezer.

I worked at Findspire as lead software engineer from 2013 to 2016.

In 2016, it had more than 7 million audio tracks, several hundred thousands images and tens of thousands of music videos.

I was actually the first hire of the team, working directly with the 2 co-founders (CEO and CTO). As lead software engineer, I was responsible for a lot of things, including:

• architecture and development of the web back-end using Django, including a custom ORM for several NoSQL databases (CouchDB, Redis and Elasticsearch);

• development of the first versions of the web front-end, first in vanilla JavaScript, then with Backbone (which made sense in 2013);

• development of a media processing pipeline using Celery, ImageMagick and ffmpeg (audio and video transcoding, image processing and resizing, storage…);

• tooling required for deploying the site: various Shell scripts around Django and r.js;

• system administration (“devops”) of the hosting platform: various Linux hosts with 2 FreeBSD load balancers, managed with Puppet and Foreman;

• development of the first versions of the Android app;

• development of a content ingestion system to integrate the catalogue of major music distributors (Universal Music, Warner Music, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, Believe, Because, PIAS, etc.) in the website: data storage, audio processing (which entailed adding DRM to audio files), metadata handling with lots of overly complex, poorly formatted XML files (DDEX and ITMSP standards);

• development of a content distribution system to let end-users access this music, with advanced authentication and authorization based on the user’s location, the date, their premium status, and rights described in the distributor’s metadata;

• development of several Flash media players to access the content: a headless audio player controlled from JavaScript, and a video player that could be embedded in Facebook and Twitter posts.

That’s a lot of things in only 3 years!

Findspire closed down in October 2016.