engineering.squarespace

Squarespace Engineering FEB 15 Building the Future of Squarespace Templates GEORGE ZHANG Squarespace Templates are powerful tools used by millions of people every day to build their websites without writing code. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve released two of our newest consumer templates—Endeavor and Wright—on GitHub. JAN 13 Implementing HTTP/2 for Squarespace Websites FRANKLIN ANGULO At Squarespace, we strive to provide our customers and their visitors with fast and responsive browsing experiences. Today, we proudly announce HTTP/2 support for all Squarespace sites with TLS enabled. DEC 20 SaaS: Screenshots as a Service MIKE WRIGHTON As part of our ongoing efforts to improve user experience on the Squarespace platform, we added a feature to display thumbnail previews of all of your account’s sites in the account picker. Since we didn’t have any existing functionality around screenshot generation, this was something we had to build from scratch. In this post we’ll talk about the screenshots microservice solution we came up with. NOV 23 Forum Fronting JACOB ANGEL Every other Wednesday, the Frontend Engineers at Squarespace convene in a large room to hash out these issues. We discuss and shop around new technologies and patterns. We decide which haircuts to give our yaks, and what shade of gray looks best on our bike shed. NOV 1 Functional Reactive Programming on Mobile: A Rosetta Stone NICK TINSLEY One of the newer programming paradigms we have been enthusiastic to adopt is functional reactive programming, which combines functional programming and reactive programming. OCT 24 Implementing SSL/TLS for All Squarespace Sites FRANKLIN ANGULO At Squarespace, we believe we are responsible for providing a platform on which customers and their visitors can be assured a secure browsing experience. Today, we’re proudly announcing completely free Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) for all custom domains on our platform. OCT 3 The Squarespace Template Compiler PATRICK HENSLEY In early 2013, we began constructing a replacement template compiler in Java, Squarespace's main development language. The new compiler, now open sourced, was designed and implemented from scratch, which enabled several improvements to be made. SEP 1 Turbocharging Our UI Tests MIKE WRIGHTON Automated UI tests are a crucial part of our QA process. Before going to production, we run a set of smoke tests which navigate around parts of the UI, recording screenshots and comparing them against a set of golden images. If a significant mismatch occurs, we consider the test failed and halt deploys while we investigate the issue. AUG 4 The Developer Platform Gets Local COLE KRUMBHOLZ Today, we’re announcing a new developer tool called the Squarespace Local Development Server. With it, developers can preview changes to template code locally (on their computer) before pushing them to a live website. JUL 22 Data Traceability and Lineage MATT SOLOMON Data scientists, business operations, finance, and marketing teams are all working off our curated data stores to make critical decisions about the direction of the business, and there will inevitably come a time when somebody looks at a report and asks: "How do we know these numbers are correct?" JUL 22 Building an eCommerce Tax Engine JULIAN APPLEBAUM 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. JUL 22 Introducing the Squarespace Engineering Blog FRANKLIN ANGULO At Squarespace, our mission is to provide creative tools that help anyone bring their ideas to life. In this blog you'll learn about the ups and downs of our engineering endeavors.