AI is incredible for rapid idea and hypothesis testing by prototyping. It isn't about writing code — it’s about protecting your most valuable resource: cognitive energy. As engineers, we often face the overwhelming task of determining the look, feel, and architecture of an idea through hundreds of tiny decisions. By the time we get to the novel part of the problem we’re trying to solve, our brains are tired. We can burn out before we even truly begin. To solve this, we can steal a trick from artists and writers.
We read reviews before buying a TV, a sweater, almost anything. Businesses do the same – potential enterprise partners evaluate APIs through every piece of content they come across. So, what happens when you improve all of it?
HTML video and audio lazy loading is now a web standard and quickly gaining support in all major browsers. Given Squarespace’s role in proposing and implementing it, we’re very excited to see how developers use it on the web. Let’s cover some best practices for using video and audio lazy loading in any website, as well as some gotchas to avoid.
At Squarespace, many of our core products are built on web standards, and our engineers are constantly pushing the boundaries of the web’s capabilities. Occasionally, those boundaries reveal a limitation: an opportunity for the web’s native capabilities to grow. This post is the story of how we found such an opportunity to work with the standards community to improve the web in a way that we – and everyone who uses it – can benefit.
In the fast-paced world of software development, documentation often gets a bad rap. It's perceived as a chore, a necessary evil, and sometimes, unfortunately, an afterthought. But what if writing documentation could be as dynamic and collaborative as writing the code itself? What if it could be simpler to write and more practical to use?
Our teams love relational databases and the benefits ACID properties bring to us as engineers, but they have their limits, especially in horizontal scaling. We had to adopt new database tech across a fleet of highly available services while eliminating as much risk as possible… but how? Enter: change data capture patterning.
On the Unfold team at Squarespace, our mobile releases don't require much in the way of manual intervention or human oversight. In fact, we don’t have to give releases much thought at all. But, this was not always true. This post is a look into what these non-eventful mobile releases are like, dig into how much more eventful they used to be, and walk through the work it took us to get here.
Recently we introduced a write back cache to our Asset Library. This improvement makes life easier for both our customers and our developers. This post walks through the why, the why not and the how.
The outro recaps what you did – write technical documentation! – and introduces next steps like organizing a collection of documentation, revising existing content, and expanding your technical writing skills by joining the technical writing community.
After completing Parts 1, 2, and 3 of this tutorial, your once blank page now has technical writing – you're officially in the home stretch! Technical writing on a page becomes technical documentation only after you test, edit, and publish the content. Do not underestimate the exponential payoff that comes from testing and revising content. More than one technical writer can claim that revision has either uncovered bugs in software or improved it.
In my opinion, creating good headings and organizing them in a way that’s helpful to readers is much more challenging than drafting content. So pat yourself on the back for completing Part 2 of this series and making it to Part 3. 👏 👏 👏 However, there are three things that undo exceptional headings and structure in technical documentation: content that is inaccurate, content that’s inconsistent, and content that’s inflated.
Part 1 of this tutorial introduced you to the content types that are most common in technical documentation. You also evaluated a real-life example as a reader, and you may have realized how headings are essential to a good reader experience. It’s because readers on the web do not read – they scan ¹ . People actually read 25% slower on the web² and they only read 20% of the content on a page³. (This data is from 2008; I’m scared to know the percentage today.)
In the same way the term “books” includes fiction, nonfiction, and biographies as genres, the term “technical documentation” includes many different content types. But what sets technical documentation apart from books are reader traits. These traits are a result of what the reader does as they read technical documentation – they use the app.
Writing is a learned skill. No one person is a good or bad writer. 🙂 When a colleague asked me to mentor them on technical writing, I searched for a single technical writing article, guide, book, or tutorial that addressed three key things. Since I couldn’t find one, I decided to create a tutorial on technical writing.
Last month we shipped the biggest change to our core website editing experience in ten years: Fluid Engine. This blog post addresses how we arrived at the implementation, in addition to walking through a few technical and user experience issues that were core to the development of this feature.
Imagine you are editing your Squarespace website on your desktop browser and you want to add great photos that make your site stand out. At that moment, you realize those great photos are actually on your phone. Wouldn’t it be great if you could cut out all the intermediate steps and directly access your phone’s photo library right from the desktop browser into your Squarespace website?
Recently, we introduced Background Art as a new way for customers to add graphics to their websites. This feature leverages WebGL to generate abstract animated graphics client side. These graphics can be seamlessly added to a web page, offering an alternative to images and videos for section backgrounds.
More so than any other level of the management chain, front-line engineering managers are the most attuned to the day to day realities of shipping software. Giving them a collective voice to surface what works and what doesn’t is critical to understanding the efficacy of organizational policy and process.
“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.
How do you make a website look good when you can't know how that website will look? It turns out this is one of the fundamental questions we work with at Squarespace. Since one of our goals is to make it easy for our users to create beautiful websites, we need to walk a delicate balance between constraints and freedom. So, how do we navigate that balance?
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