Making the Invisible Visible: A Look at Building Tools for Square Developers

mootrichard

Richard Moot

Posted on January 15, 2019

Making the Invisible Visible: A Look at Building Tools for Square Developers

Written by Lindy Zeng on **Square Corner Blog**

At Square, the Developers team exposes APIs that allow third-party developers to build custom business-processing solutions. On October 18, we announced to developers using our APIs that webhooks would now support retries. If a webhook cannot be delivered, our system will now be able to retry multiple times until a successful delivery.

Square’s webhook delivery system is a service I’ll refer to as Webhooks. Improving Webhooks’ reliability was a project I had the opportunity to dive into the first week I started at Square as a new college graduate. From the beginning, we wanted our Webhooks upgrades to require no change on the part of our external developers, in stark contrast to the amount of research, planning and work that went into the project. In fact, the announcement we sent out assured developers that they “should not need to make any changes to support webhooks with retries.” My manager remarked that it was “the most invisible change ever” — and that is how it should be. The focus of our team is to enable developers to easily integrate with Square’s APIs and provide them with a reliable and simple-to-use experience. Perhaps it was my manager’s remark about our “invisible” project that inspired me to share some insight into not only our webhooks reliability project, but also some of our “visibility” practices here at Square.

Read more on the Square Corner Blog

💖 💪 🙅 🚩
mootrichard
Richard Moot

Posted on January 15, 2019

Join Our Newsletter. No Spam, Only the good stuff.

Sign up to receive the latest update from our blog.

Related