Fun Friday: Meet Nick Fisher

This week please help me welcome Nick to the team! An Aussie import who moved to Berlin during the winter, Nick loves Grinderman, code and chilled beats! Meet him below!

Hi! Thank you for doing this interview with me and taking time out of your busy day. How are ya doing?

Yeah, tops! I’ve been reading everyone else’s interviews over the last few months and now it’s my chance to say hello to the SoundCloud community.

How do you like Berlin and where are you originally from? How long have you been here so far?

I’m originally from Brisbane, Australia, and I moved here in September last year. Everyone thought I was a little strange for leaving a subtropical summer for the blistering cold of Berlin in the wintertime, but I actually really enjoyed it. Sure, it might’ve been the novelty of my first snow, but sliding down the hill at Mauerpark on a plastic bag is awesome fun and I’m actually looking forward to the winter which is just around the corner.

The thing I love the most about Berlin is being able to ride everywhere on my bike. It’s surprisingly easy to get anywhere you want to go and a fantastic way to get to know a city! A couple of months ago, I saw a band set up in the back of a rent-a-van playing to an audience of about 12 people on the road at Weinbergsweg!

Can you tell us what your your role at SoundCloud is? Also, how do you like working in the Berlin HQ ?

I’m working as a Front End Developer here at HQ. What I find really enjoyable about this role is how far Javascript has come and how fast it continues to develop. It’s a really exciting area to work in right now and at SoundCloud we’re doing some amazing things with it right now. Working here is great fun too, because there is so much going on. It’s fascinating to see what achievements each team has to show off at the end of the sprint, regardless of whether they’re in development, product, community or whatever! It’s hard to pin down exactly what it is, but as a famous Australian lawyer once said, “It’s the vibe”.

How did you get introduced to SoundCloud and what do you love most about it?

I’d vaguely known about SoundCloud for a while with meeting some of the team at conferences and user groups, but it came to my attention gradually as I started noticing more and more links to tracks linked on blogs I read and in my friends’ updates. It’s fantastic to be able to have a platform for people to publish and host their music online. Before SoundCloud, what did we have? MySpace? Bleugh.

Even beyond music, with the iOS and Android applications out now, it’s an easy way for anyone to capture sound, whether it’s dogs in the park, a busker playing Hotel California on the spoons, or your own impression of Jonsi from Sigur Ros.

What are your favorite Sounds on the cloud?

I have quite an eclectic taste in music, so usually I just load up the latest uploaded tracks and hit play! It’s a great way to find new music that you might never have listened to before. I’ve really been enjoying the artists on the Anti Records label , especially Tinariwen

and Aussie band Grinderman

The chilled beats and mashups from Handbook are also hitting the spot right now.

Finally, do you have any fun facts about yourself that you would like to share?

I once played in a band called “Jane Austin and the Do Anyones”. We got the name from my friends’ web-comic called “Upwardly Nubile” about 19th century romantic authors living in a flat together and playing in a band. Plus there was a guy called Squidhead. I think our biggest gig was playing in my friend’s garage to about 15 people. Sadly this was in the days before SoundCloud… who knows how huge we could have been?

Awesome! Can we find you on the interwebz?

Here’s my SoundCloud page, http://soundcloud.com/spadgos
Here’s my nerdblog where I sometimes talk about code, http://spadgos.com/