Episode Zero – The Square Developer Podcast

Adam Stacoviak: Well friends, we're here episode zero of the Square Dev Podcast. My name is Adams Stacoviak and I run Change Log, and I'm here with Richard Moot, head of Dev Rel for Square. Richard, how are you?

Richard Moot: I'm good. I'm so glad that you decided to help us out here in getting this episode zero of the Square Developer Podcast, getting everybody introduced to what it is that we're trying to do here.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah, I love the platform. I love working with you guys. Amazing team, big fan, many, many years, big fan. And I'm even excited about the podcast, believe it or not, and behind the scenes we're helping you produce it, helping you with some of the editorial processes and just making an amazing podcast, which is really, really hard. As you may know, Richard, it's not easy to deliver a world-class podcast, but here we are. We're doing it.

Richard Moot: Well. I mean, when we thought that we wanted to do a podcast, there's nobody else that we wanted to partner with. I mean, you convinced us in all the years that we've been chatting with you, listening to the podcasts, definitely inspired to be able to come here and work with you and then ultimately tell the stories that we want to be able to tell, to get developers excited about our platform, understand what's possible, and really just showcase all the different use cases that people can have when it comes to Square and everything that makes it great to build on this platform.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah, I think even in Episode Zero should be more common for new podcasts because I feel like if you just start launching shows somewhere in there, you have to explain who you are, what you do, why you care, what they can expect. There's some sort of promise that a podcast delivers, and that's my hope today was just to sit down with you and talk through what is this podcast going to be about? Who will you feature? Where will it live on the internet? Do you even know these questions yet? I know as you begin something new, there's things that you iterate towards. You don't always have all the details figured out, so what can we answer about who you'll feature and what this podcast will be about?

Richard Moot: I really want people to understand why they want to listen to this podcast, what they're going to be tuning into. We're really going to showcase some of our largest developers, some of our smaller developers. We have one person who actually won one of our hackathons, Bihn Ly, who builds the Operator app. It's a very interesting use case, allows SMS texting from landlines. It's something that has become more common, but I don't think we all really think about all too much.

And the interesting way is that this can make a business run better, especially if you're a solo business owner and the phone's ringing, but you're working with a client. They have ways of solving how to get business retention and get in touch with folks. And then we also talk to a different hackathon, one of ours payable with Ryan May, and they have a really interesting use case of integrating with Google Cloud and Google Business Suite and allowing you to just take a payment from a Google form.

It's so simple, but so useful and powerful because a lot of people use Google Suite for small businesses for doing their email and all that management. Sometimes they're just like, Hey, I want to be able to collect some info at an event and then have them pay for it right then and there. And it all started from really small things where you just had a group event where everybody was supposed to pay 20 bucks for a T-shirt and they had to fill out a form, and just thought, why can't we just take the payment at the end of the form? Why do we have to gather all this info and then later go, Hey, did you get the 20 bucks from each person? So it's just really simple. Things sometimes can be really powerful and unlock entire businesses.

Adam Stacoviak: So developer stories of course is always fun. Will you be featuring some of the inside of the developer podcast at Square, like the API the GraphQL stuff you're doing a lot of the innovation you're doing to enable merchants to be faster, better, stronger, all the things.

Richard Moot: Yeah, you're totally right. So we ended up also having the folks from Apollo GraphQL join us for the podcast and talk to one of the engineers that actually built our internal GraphQL endpoints that ultimately enabled us to publish the public version of the Square GraphQL Endpoints. And just really trying to talk about all the different things that we've leveraged of federated schemas, and we even start talking about the future of GraphQL as they're trying to solidify new standards and really trying to build a whole new community around this to get GraphQL to the same level of rest in terms of design standards

Adam Stacoviak: When it comes to the developers that should listen to this podcast, I know that I kind of have an idea who that might be, but do you expect the audience to be mostly Square aware, or do you expect to attract a new style developer that might be like, wow, I can do this with the Square Developer platform, and I had no idea that I could be an app partner or publish something to the marketplace? Or all the places that you enable merchants and developers to sort of intermingle and make these amazing things happen?

Richard Moot: Yeah, I mean, the kind of developer that I imagine is not necessarily one that has to be familiar with Square. I'm really hoping that through the different conversations and people that we feature on the podcast, that we can draw curiosity from anybody who might not have even considered using Square. They might be building their own little side app. They have their little side hustle, and then they go, oh, I didn't realize that I could actually integrate a Square Terminal device. And then we have a whole episode where we're talking with these folks who help build out the integrations for ShakeShack and Chase Center using our terminal devices. And it's the same exact thing that you could buy in a store and connect to a terminal API and then be building your own kiosk app if you want it. And beyond that, we also want to showcase some of, even our new open source projects like our new AI Agent Goose, which helps you in your development process. So we really kind of want to reach a broad audience to just have some interesting things. We hope that you'll learn a little bit about the Square Developer platform and what's possible along the way.

Adam Stacoviak: Well, friends, the show is out there ready for you to listen to, subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts. Enjoy.