All by Julian Applebaum

With continuous deployment enabled for critical backend services and Squarespace’s entire application frontend, it is essential to have meaningful, reliable UI tests. Anything merged to master will ship to production automatically with no human checks, so these tests are the last guarantee that basic features of our product work. To effectively test Squarespace’s complex, interaction-heavy application, we built a uniquely powerful browser testing tool called Charcoal.

As a DIY platform, the approach Squarespace takes with taxes is to let merchants enter in the rates they need to collect, then provide a calculator that can apply those rates to a shopping cart. Squarespace’s role is thus not to know the exact details of a given tax system, but rather, to provide a tool that can effectively model the most common ones.