Squarespace engineers built a microservices framework during Hack Week that became a production platform. The monolith slowed feature work as the company scaled, so a new team extracted components into independent services to let product engineers focus on features instead of infrastructure.
I think what's very nice about Hack Week here at Squarespace is that we take Hack Week seriously. We think it's important for our organization, also from a cultural perspective, but also from the engineering perspective. As an engineer at Squarespace, you decide what you wanted to get out of Hack Week. We've had so many examples of new services or new features in existing services that teams went and did in Hack Week, and then fast forward 1 or 2 months and now it's in production and now everybody's using it and everybody's saying, oh, how come we didn't have this before? This is great.
Third Hack Week project I worked on was with Doug Jones. We sat down and said, hey, wouldn't it be awesome if we just do this for a week and see how we could build an MVP of a microservice framework?
Our team name is Microservices Platform these days, which describes both what we're doing now and our ambition in that we aim to support All microservices here at Squarespace.
The reason why we built microservices, it was hard as an engineer to build software at Squarespace. To some extent, it is still hard to build software at Squarespace. You still have a bunch of tools, but the fact of the matter is that if I'm building microservice X, I still depend on many things that live within the monolith.
It is a valid architecture, the monolith architecture. However, it doesn't scale well as we grow as an organization.
So there's a whole Working group trying to figure out and address the really tough problem of how do you take all those things that are living in the monolith, extract them out to microservice so that it's actually even easier for an engineer to build software at Squarespace.
We provide a platform to accelerate our product developers and let them focus on problems that are interesting to them instead of a whole lot of infrastructure-y and best practices that we can just take away from them and help them do the right thing.
I think it makes probably both Doug and myself really proud that through one idea that we had and executed on, we eventually built full teams around this. And to me, it's amazing that this just started in a 4-week project.
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