peter sobot 🇨🇦

beep boop

💡 about

• I am a staff software engineer at Spotify in New York City.
  Before that, I was a senior software engineer at PagerDuty in Toronto.
  My résumé is available for viewing online or printing.
• I travel to places and talk in front of large groups of people.
• I build, maintain and publish open-source software on Github.
  Some of these projects include:
  • 🎛️🔊 Pedalboard, the best audio processing library for Python
  • 🛰️ Voyager, fast nearest-neighbor search in Python and Java
  • The Wub Machine, a music remixing app on web and mobile
  • keynote-parser, a Python library for working with Apple Keynote files
• I play bass and drums in Off-Beat Jazz and New Yacht City.
• I produce electronic music, much of which is available on Spotify (some as ☀️).
• I post about software and music on Twitter and Mastodon.
• I write a blog on software and technology.
• I proudly hail from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, so I spell colour with the letter "u".

😀 be social

• @psobot on tweeter dot com
  use this to contact me for maximum #brand #engagement or to tell “fun internet jokes”
• Peter Sobot on LinkedIn
  Recruiters: unsolicited messages on LinkedIn will be marked as spam.
• lots_of_spam@petersobot.com via regular email
  or updog@petersobot.com if you're not spambot

📽 talks & presentations

• April 2024

  So, You Want To Give A Talk - Five Ways To Keep Your Audience Off Of Their Phones
  presented as a lightning talk at PyTexas on April 20th, 2024

• April 2024

  Working with Audio in Python (feat. Pedalboard)
  presented at PyTexas on April 20th, 2024

• December 2022

  It's All About Cost: How to Think about Machine Learning Products
  presented at NormConf on December 15th, 2022

• July 2022

  Working with Audio in Python (feat. Pedalboard)
  presented at EuroPython in Dublin on July 13th, 2022

• April 2022

  Bits of Math at Scale
  on the NerdOut@Spotify podcast on April 28th, 2022

• May 2019

  Even more vintage: releasing music on a custom-built Game Boy cartridge!
  presented at !!con in NYC on May 12th, 2019

• April 2019

  Music Recommendations at Scale with Cloud Bigtable
  presented at Google Cloud Next in San Francisco on April 9, 2019

• October 2018

  The Recommendations Engine
  presented at The Working Group in Toronto on October 12th, 2018

• January 2017

  Words Are Hard: Talking Good via Computer
  presented at CUSEC 2017 in Montréal on January 13th, 2017

• April 2016

  The Floppy Disk
  presented at xvzf.io: artifact, stories about past lives in Toronto on April 14th, 2016

• September 2015

  An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm
  presented at Papers We Love Toronto on September 2nd, 2015

• November 2014

  Welcome to the Tech Industry
  presented at Bitmaker Labs in Toronto on November 19th, 2014

📝 writings

• Voyager: Spotify's New Nearest-Neighbor Search Library published at Spotify October 2023
• Reviving an Analog Polysynth with an Arduino, Ghidra, and Python November 2022
• Patching an Embedded OS from 1996 with Ghidra April 2022
• Pedalboard: Spotify's Audio Effects Library for Python published at Spotify September 2021
• Machine Learning for Drummers July 2018
• Echo Dot vs. Chromecast Audio: An Evaluation June 2017
• Never Miss a Shift with the On-Call Timeline published at PagerDuty April 2017
• #oncallselfie published at PagerDuty December 2016
• Debugging an Empty Spam Email October 2016
• Getting Paged Never Looked So Good published at PagerDuty October 2016
• A DeepDream Web Service for $5 a Month July 2015
• The Cost of Waterloo Software Engineering September 2014
• The Holiday Party Hack published at The Working Group December 2013
• The Architecture of an Infinite Stream of Music November 2013
• Co-Working at The Working Group October 2013
• Shared State and Customer Confusion August 2013
• Pipes and Filters August 2013
• Dangerously Convenient APIs April 2013
• Interns are Leading the Way January 2013
• Emergency Bandwidth Distribution November 2012
• Introducing forever.fm November 2012
• Rewriting in C++ for Fun, Speed and Masochism October 2012
• The Ubiquitous Capture Device June 2012
• Using Eight Cores (incorrectly) with Python May 2012
• A Site For Dinner May 2012
• Startups: Bands for Hackers April 2012
• A Use for Smartphone Photos April 2012
• Software, Art, Music, and Games February 2012
• The middle ground between form and function January 2012
• “The Street Preacher” - A Hyper-Local Twitter Bot November 2011
• More Lessons from The Wub Machine November 2011
• The Wub Machine, Postmortem June 2011
• The Wub Machine, Revisited June 2011
• The Wub Machine May 2011
• A Better Music Workflow? March 2011
• Pushed to my Pocket January 2011
• What a difference four months makes... January 2011
• Macbook & Two Hard Drives December 2010
• OhLife and Online Privacy December 2010
• Live Status Updates with PHP December 2010

🛠 projects

• October 2023

  voyager
  fast embedded nearest-neighbor search in Python and Java

• December 2022

  k2000
  a Python package for working with the Kurzweil® K2000®/K2500®/K2600® family of synthesizers

• November 2022

  arduino-coldfire-bdm
  a cheap Arduino-based interface for Motorola® ColdFire™ microcontrollers

• September 2021

  pedalboard
  the best Python library for working with audio (including VST/AU hosting)

• January 2019

  keynote-parser
  a Python library for editing Apple Keynote files

• September 2016 - April 2017

  MusicBoy
  custom nintendo game boy cartridge for audio playback

• January 2016

  entryphone (not yet released)
  web-based proxy for phone-based apartment entry systems

• June 2015

  deepdre.am (defunct, read here)
  web interface to Google's DeepDream image processor

• May 2015

  SampleScanner
  convert an outboard hardware MIDI instrument into a VST/Audio Unit

• May 2015

  Hangover
  native Mac client for Google Hangouts (obsolete)

• April 2015

  koodo-prepaid-api and koodo-prepaid-dashboard
  programmatic interface and extensions to Koodo Mobile's prepaid customer portal

• February 2015

  battery-emoji
  display your Mac's current battery status in your terminal via 🔋 and 🔌 Emoji

• September 2014

  secalculator
  financial calculator and estimator for Waterloo Software Engineering students

• October 2013

  postagelogger
  Python logging handler that sends emails via PostageApp

• July 2013

  fundway
  graph your financial runway and find out when you need to get a real job

• July 2013

  ipsumcrypt
  encrypt binary data into the spaces between words, for fun

• March 2013

  biographer
  keep social profile information consistent across services

• March 2013

  mp3toyoutube
  upload batches of audio files as YouTube videos from the command line

• March 2013

  vandal
  write messages in your Github commit graph

• November 2012

  forever.fm
  infinite stream of automatically DJ'd music

• September 2012

  jobmon
  Waterloo JobMine email notifier

• September 2012

  notifyay
  tiny email-based website uptime monitor

• August 2012

  smartcrop
  automatically crop images to their most visually interesting parts (blog post)

• January 2012

  ninjaquote
  which of your friends said something on Facebook? (won Facebook@UWaterloo hackathon 2012)

• May 2011

  The Wub Machine
  automagic dubstep remixer and temporary internet sensation

This page is bytes of hand-written HTML with no mandatory external assets, stored in Amazon S3, and served over HTTPS via Amazon CloudFront to make it stupid fast. Find its source code on Github.

© 2000 - Peter Sobot