Hacking on Rd.io at Spotify - Contributing Back

This is part of my experience when I attended the Spotify NYC hackathon, way back in the day.

As I worked on combining the Twilio API and the Rd.io API - I ran into unexpected behaviors.

Connecting the two APIs should be straight forward, but the frontend I had for it would not update when changes happened on the back.

This stumped me - so much that I asked for help from Rd.io’s developer evangelist. They were at the hackathon all night - that’s important, because you never know when you will run into an issue.

Debugging the problem with them, I eventually found the issue - I had two browsers opened with the player - this created a weird internal state for the player, so caused unexpected behaviors.

What the developer evangelist said to me next blew me away:

You replicated a bug we have been hunting down for a long time!

🤩

Yes, in a matter of hours, I replicated an issue the Rd.io team was hunting for.

Being able to contribute back to improving a company’s product is a great feeling, especially within hours of using their product.

With that issue resolved - I thought about adding another dimension to my hack.