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As our suite of products has grown from a website builder and commerce tools to encompass much more, synchronizing frontend state across these products has become increasingly important. Complicating the matter, some products run in iframes, whereas others run in the main browser window. We’ve developed a scalable approach to synchronization that abstracts away these differences, which we call Universal State.
Mobile apps have complex state, view life cycle, callbacks, and other things that make testing hard. The web has been around a lot longer than mobile and enjoys the benefits of long-established tooling and practices for testing. Because the world of mobile testing is relatively new, it takes time and patience to determine which best practices will work for your team.
Developing great products isn’t just a matter of engineering; it’s also about developing an understanding of your users and their needs. A/B Testing is one of the most powerful tools in this regard, and over the past year, we’ve been turning A/B testing into a simple, repeatable process that scales with our product aspirations.
You bolt awake in dead of night. Something is crying out in the darkness. You cast about for the source. The screaming of a banshee? The sneering laugh of a goblin? Worse. An alert is firing on your phone.
“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.
A buzz enters the air at the start of Hack Week. A week of boundless exploration begins. Exploration, collaboration, creativity, ingenuity, and optimism reign supreme. Yet, would these qualities still reign supreme when we’re all working remotely? Would Hack Week even work remotely?
To change the culture around testing at Squarespace, we knew it would take more than a single team. We started a working group, bringing together both engineers and non-engineers from across the company to address the problem. If you have a cross-organizational issue that needs to be solved, here’s how to do it.
“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.
Squarespace’s Data Science team helps stakeholders across the company make better strategic decisions using data. Marketing attribution, one major focus of the team’s work, is how we answer the question: “How much credit does each form of marketing deserve for a sale or conversion?”
A/B tests can help organizations make better decisions, but we often only hear about the “success stories.” What about the A/B tests that don't have flashy outcomes? Here's how Squarespace communicates about A/B tests to ensure we learn from all tests.
RFCs, also called Design Documents, let us describe software designs before implementation. But how do you make sure that RFCs get deep review and are seen by the right people? How do you help reviewers catch problems in a system’s design? We’ve been iterating on our RFC review process and here’s what we’ve come up with.
At Squarespace, the Edge team manages the TLS infrastructure, which handles the life cycle of millions of SSL certificates used by our customers. This makes us one of the largest users of Let’s Encrypt, a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA).
