Fun Friday: Meet Paul Osman

Let’s give a warm welcome and high five to Paul Osman, Developer Evangelist at SoundCloud who hails from Toronto! He’s here to help and inspire our awesome developer community to build neat projects on the web using the SoundCloud API.

Hello! Thanks for doing this interview. Can you introduce yourself?
For sure! I’m Paul Osman, a hacker who hails from Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

First, can you take a minute and let us know what you do at SoundCloud?

I’ve just joined the Platform Team as a Developer Evangelist. That means I’ll be working with our developer community to help make sure our platform meets their needs as much as possible. I’ll be taking care of documentation, some of our client API wrapper libraries, coming up with cool hack ideas and generally trying to be helpful.

You are working with our Platforms team in San Francisco but will be working from Toronto, correct? What do you love most about Toronto?

That’s right, we now have a Toronto office that consists of me and my cat :) There are so many things to love about Toronto. If I had to pin it down to one thing, I would say that it’s the neighbourhoods. Toronto does a great job blending commercial and residential areas in a way that seems really natural. One moment you’ll be on a busy street with lots of shops, restaurants and cafés, then you’ll turn a corner and be on a quiet tree lined street with gorgeous Victorian houses.

This is a question I always love asking – How did you get introduced to the ‘Cloud?
It was a few years ago. I remember I started seeing the distinctive waveform player all over the place (on music blogs mostly) and decided to check it out. I saw that a few people I knew had already uploaded sounds so I started following them and I’ve been hooked ever since!

And this is an easy one – What are your favorite things about working at SoundCloud so far?

I’ve got the best job in the world because I get to work with like minded hackers and see all the great stuff people build with our platform. It’s really exciting to see how people are coming up with new ways to use sound on the web.

At the moment, what are your favorite sounds on the ‘Cloud?
There are a few standards that I follow, for example here’s one of my favourite Four Tet albums:

Also, there’s a British band called Marconi Union who have composed what is apparently the most relaxing song in the world. Great background music for coding!

Lastly, do you have any fun facts you can tell us about?

I’m generally a pretty relaxed person, but for some reason I get really obsessive about angles in my workspaces. I can’t work if things aren’t at least mostly at right angles. I have to have everything on my desk arranged a specific way and I need to have all the windows in my desktops arranged a certain way, otherwise I get all distracted.

Nice! Where can we find you on the web?
Twitter: http://twitter.com/paulosman
Github: http://github.com/paulosman
Quora: http://quora.com/paul-osman
Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/users/195977/paul-osman

And my personal blog: http://paulosman.me/

Thanks Paul!<