What I’ve learned at Squarespace is that technical aesthetics can be described precisely and that developing that vocabulary to use in conversations with colleagues about the merits of designs can lead to more beautiful systems, which carry significant practical benefits.
“The Nuts and Bolts” is a reoccurring Q&A with Squarespace engineers. Questions are compiled by their peers to guarantee we get right to the good stuff.
Every day here at Squarespace, data scientists are building customer behavior models, financial analysts are evaluating company performance, and PMs are investigating the results of new feature launches. Critical to the success of each of those groups is the Data Engineering team, which processes and makes accessible to the organization all business-critical data.
At Squarespace, our mission is to help anyone in the world bring their ideas to life through our platform. We want to provide a fully localized product and set of tools so that our current and future customers have the ability to create a website in any language using the entirety of the product.Along with the launch of an end-to-end Squarespace experience in Spanish, in this blog post we would like to take a look at some of the major technologies that power our global expansion.
“The Nuts and Bolts” is a reoccurring Q&A with Squarespace engineers. Questions are compiled by their peers to guarantee we get right to the good stuff.
Over the last four years, Squarespace’s product offerings have expanded significantly. To keep up with Squarespace's growing platform, we needed to scale our functional test coverage. We created Firepit, a user interface (UI) for configuring and triggering tests. Firepit empowers engineers to easily run custom test suites in Squarespace's deployment environments. The foundation of our testing philosophy is straightforward: write tests that are simple, readable, and stable.
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.
Designing web service APIs can be a tricky art form. APIs serve as a virtual playbook necessary for interacting with your business domain, and more importantly, they are the contracts that bind service owners with their consumers. Therefore, getting design right early on is an important part of the service engineering we do at Squarespace.
“The Nuts and Bolts” is a recurring Q&A with Squarespace engineers. Questions are compiled by their peers to guarantee we get right to the good stuff.
It is important to understand how containers are implemented using Linux control groups (cgroups) and namespaces. Understanding the features and limitations has helped us dramatically improve the performance of our Java services especially under stressful scenarios.
Squarespace hosts millions of websites on our cloud-based website-building platform. The reliability of these sites is a top priority for us. We’re consistently implementing the best technologies and safeguards to enable quick load times and prevent outages. The measures we take allow our customers to create Squarespace websites with confidence.
Over the last three years, we have begun to make investments in architectural changes, including the breakup of our monolith into smaller, well-defined service boundaries. In this blog post, I will touch on a challenge that the Core Services Team faced: defining the pillars and core functionality of a service.