If you’re reading this between 10am-8pm GMT on Easter Monday 2004, right now there’s a system we’ve built at BBC Radio & Music Interactive which is driving Radio 1. During this time, those of you in the UK can text your choice of artist and track into Radio 1 and they’ll play it. More or less. Basically, they have no scheduled playlist whatsoever, and every track Radio 1 plays over a 10 hour period will be chosen by the listeners. This is the Radio 1 10-hour takeover, letting listeners really shape the broadcast. And we built the system that’s running it: aggregating texts, doing fuzzy matching on artist and song names, looking for and learning from patterns etc. When I say "we" I in no way mean "me", of course, as I haven’t coded in anger for years. The credit should go to my fab software team.
For more on the super-situated software that the team wrote (i.e. written to work for about 3 people in a small studio, albeit handling tens of thousands of incoming txts), check Matt Biddulph’s story of what we built for Radio 1. Some good choice words in Matt’s description: "foundation of components", "interop(erability)", "loosely-coupled layers", "resilient", "clusterability", "generic and useful in other contexts". For some of you, this software design will be of interest long after the listeners have handed control back …
City of Sound 
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