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The Square Developer Podcast

The Square Developer Podcast

By: Square
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 The Square Developer Podcast dives deep into the backend of a business. Hear discussions about tech that fuels commerce innovation with folks who have built apps, integrations, businesses, and more on the Square developer platform. In each episode, we’ll chat with a dev about their real-life experience using Square tools — the good, the bad, and the buggy are all fair game as we go behind the build. Together, we’ll talk about the tech world at large, and how it influences their decisions or drives their ideas forward.2024 The Square Developer Podcast
Episodes
  • Building Innovative Mobile Solutions for Restaurants

    Building Innovative Mobile Solutions for Restaurants
    May 12 2025
    Richard Moot: Hello and welcome to the Square Developer Podcast. I'm your host, Richard. Head of Devrel here at Square. And today I'm joined by David and Arielle from Blue Rocket. Thank you so much for being here. Can you go ahead and just give us a quick little intro and tell us about Blue Rocket.David Foote: Blue rocket is a boutique design and development firm, and we kind of cut our teeth on restaurant apps very early in the history of the iPhone. We were the ones that put together Chipotle's first mobile app. And, today, we're still loving restaurants, but we're also spreading out into a lot of AI applications, especially where AI meets the phone.Richard Moot: Very cool. And, what is it that each of you do here at Blue Rocket? Just to set the context for any of our listeners here so we can like, be sure like who's who and who does what.Arielle Watson: So my name is Ariel. I do a little bit of everything. My technical title is VP of Client development. But, in any given week, that might look like working with our development team, working with clients, coding, if I'm lucky, and some design work as well.David Foote: And I'm the CEO at Blue Rocket and haven't always been, but my, my partner retired a couple years ago, and so I stepped up from CTO to CEO, but I'm still I still code on a weekly basis on a daily, daily basis because there's lots of admin and overhead to worry about as well.Richard Moot: I feel like you're describing a little bit of my life. So the majority of like, you know, your expertise within Blue Rocket is like these mobile apps. How is that like your approach to mobile app development sort of evolved over time? Or is it like you came in with, like a certain level of expertise or like, I'd love to know, like a little bit more of like, you know, how you approach those things.David Foote: Well, historically we were very iPhone centric. You know, we've done Android apps along the way, but we've always kind of been more likely to be involved in an iPhone first sort of situation where, where everything was sort of vetted and, and figured out on the iPhone. And then an Android app was created later recently. You know, we tried in like 2016, I think it was we we tried out React Native, and it was just changing so fast that we just couldn't it was just too unstable for us to to do production apps on. But, we tried again recently and we really enjoyed it. It's been a good experience. Retention. So we're actually developing for both Android and iOS at the same time with that.Richard Moot: Excellent. I think you're describing, like, exactly what my feeling has been with React Native for a very long time. And like, there's this very strong love hate relationship where I love it because I'm, I'm mainly a web developer. I know how to build stuff and react. So I felt like, oh, I suddenly feel powerful. I can make web apps or I can make mobile apps.But every time I would come back to an app after, like, I don't know, three, six months, I mean, I'm mostly going to be, like, shocked by my own code. You like who wrote this? But I would also get endlessly frustrated, like, oh, I'm going to go upgrade my dependencies. And oh my gosh, like, I can't get anything to build.And you know, actually X code's on a different version. And it was always a nightmare. So I'm glad to see that there's a little bit more stability here. It feels a little bit more reliable. Have you found that like most of this like expansion with React Native? Do you still do like native Android development or is it still kind of like iOS is like the deeper expertise and then like React Native enables this, like cross-platform, like code reuse?David Foote: We still do Android native development as well. For instance, we're doing some SDK work for a client right now. That's all. It's Java. It's not Kotlin, but it's all Java.Richard Moot: Very cool. And so part of the reason that we wanted to, like, have you on here and chat a little bit is that you've recently for one of your clients, actually started exploring building within Square's ecosystem. I'd love for you to like, tell a little bit more about, like, what brought you into adopting Square and like, how's it going?Arielle Watson: Yeah. So we were approached by a prospective client last year and given what they were out to accomplish, we evaluated a few different vendors. Square was one of them. And for the functionality that we were looking to build, Square had everything that we needed. When we looked at your guys' documentation and looked at the different APIs that you had.And so that was I think that was part of why, from a technical perspective, we recommended going with Square and then, for our client, they had a previous relationship with Square for some other of their businesses. And so they were also leaning that direction. So it worked out really well.Richard Moot: Also. And like, what was it that sort of like, stood out for you in like, sort of meeting the needs of, like, ...
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    31 mins
  • Scaling Entertainment Centers and Transforming Guest Experiences

    Scaling Entertainment Centers and Transforming Guest Experiences
    May 5 2025
    Richard Moot: Hello and welcome to the Square Developer Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Moody, head of developer relations here at Square. And today I'm joined by Eric and Alex from Headpinz. Eric, tell us a little bit about Headpinz and what it is that you do there.Eric Osborn: Sure. Absolutely. We're a chain of entertainment centers in Southwest Florida. We have everything from bowling to laser tied, the game zones, multiple restaurants, bars, and, soon to be adding an indoor racetrack. The chief information officer for head beans. And then I'm also joined by Alex here, one of our lead developers.Alex Trepasso: I'm Alex. Piggybacking off Eric there with all those different entertainment options and attractions we offer. I pretty much take over integrating them and making our whole ecosystem kind of work as one when we're dealing with all these different systems, you know, from scheduling all the way down to buying a burger, basically integrating those and overseeing the IT operations side of it.Richard Moot: Awesome. And so I don't know if this is quite mentioned, but like how many locations are you guys in the Florida region?Eric Osborn: Right now we're operating two. Well, actually three, two in which our Headpinz, we're actually making a transition from a traditional type bowling centers to more of, a hybrid type environment where we have those leagues on Monday through Friday that people are used to, you know, seeing for the traditional bowlers. But then on late night, Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, we're very much an open bowling venue, open up for families and all that good fun with laser tag and such.Richard Moot: Very cool. And so part of the reason that we're, we're talking today is you have built an integration with Square and it's it's quite interesting, but I'd love to hear the story about, you know, where you using something before. What made you go into using Square. Like tell me a little bit about like, you know what drove you into, you know, using Square through your locations.Eric Osborn: Yeah. So a little bit of a back story. We're actually use Square before our current POS provider decided to do a partnership with Square. We originally started using it for to-go orders during the Covid era when the bowling centers were shut down and we needed to find a way to get our that working.So we were online, and they were doing to-go orders and meeting them right at the door and delivering that food that has since grown into where we've actually made Square our base, then our truth of everything. And that's been a multi-year project. But everything that we do now, including the front end point of sale, our kiosk, our web reservation, anything that is touching financials are now funneling through the Square ecosystem.So a big change over the past three years. And, and that matter of fact, just over the past couple of weeks, as we've finally moved our final processes over to the Square ecosystem. So that's been great. Then where, Alex comes into play and, and, and where the development actually came from was there was some third parties that just simply did not work with Square, such as one of our kiosks, and a couple other small little things like our group function where they actually sign a contract and actually take a deposit.Those things weren't working with Square Alex along and, and worked with, the Square ecosystem on a solution to that. He can speak a little bit about how our kiosks work and such, even though they're not a native, you know, Square partnership that we got to work in on our own.Richard Moot: Yeah, I'd love to like the I mean, that's one of the things that really piqued my interest is you know, you have, well, I don't want to steal thunder here at like, the front of the venue. You have these, like, sort of kiosks where, like, it allows somebody to be able to purchase, you know, various other things, like, other than bowling.And you built this all yourself, essentially. Like, tell me a little bit about, like, the integration that you built with these kiosks and how that all works.Alex Trepasso: Yeah. So it started from a position of when we first got the kiosks, one of their native integrations was another payment provider. And kind of where we came in was, okay, we have these two different systems. You have Square on one side and this other provider on another, both doing, you know, different transaction fee rates, different handling, different view of transactions.And it came up one day in our operations and kind of just our discussions of can we unify these systems. And that led kind of down the rabbit hole of the Square terminal API was kind of our first dive into everything Square developer. And it came along, okay, we know that Square offers this, that we can use this for payments even without sending, you know, a forward or, or doing a whole POS based Square install.Let's try some things from there. We used the terminal API to start listening for those transaction...
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    43 mins
  • Integrating Phone Numbers into Brand Identity Verification

    Integrating Phone Numbers into Brand Identity Verification
    Apr 28 2025
    Richard Moot: Hello and welcome to the Square Developer Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Moot, head of developer relations here at Square, and today I'm joined by Binh Ly who's a member of our developer community and is the owner and operator of the company operating. Ben, thank you so much for joining us here. I'm so excited to chat more with you about what it is that you've built on the Square Developer platform. You're also a hackathon winner. I'd love for you to just tell us all a little bit more about how you first got involved with Square and a little bit about your involvement on the Hackathon.Binh Ly: First, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. So Square has been on my radar since around the time of the company's founding. I was working with a device that could handle credit card swipes, but I wasn't using that component of the device, but I was trying to think of a reason to use it. And then back then the thought was like it stinks is when you go to the restaurant and you're with your friends, so why can't you split that check? So we're like, let's try and build something to do that. But back then onboarding a merchant account was not that fun. So that lag time and making the sale and then getting the software activated for someone was too long, but we were fascinated that Square could do it in two minutes. So I was like, Square is pretty interesting. So I just followed the company's trajectory that whole time. And then I finally switched careers since I changed the thing that I was working on from shipping software to messaging software around 2017. So that was the first version of Operator that existed in a different company. And back then the idea was that you should be able to message any company, but how do you do that without selling software at every business in the country? So we had this really insane approach where if you text it into the system, we would call the business and ask them the information and then text it back, but,Richard Moot: Oh wow.Binh Ly: That was pretty neat that it worked that way, but ultimately wasn't scalable.But then once we realized that you could send text messages to the landlines, that changed everything because a majority of businesses have landlines and SMS is the most installed software on earth. So to get the customer you didn't have the two sided problem, the software was already on the phone. We just need to collect the text messages sent to the landline and present it to the business owner.Richard Moot: I mean, I always think that that part is fascinating to me because it's still, even after you submitted the hackathon thing and every time I come back to it, I think this is something that most people just don't think is possible of getting SMS on a landline. So for those who are not familiar with this, how is this able to work or to what degree could you sort explain how this works to us?Binh Ly: Yes. So the way it was explained to me about how it works is that you can picture a gigantic phone book and there's every phone number, every landline number is in there, and there's imagine two fields next to every phone. Number one says data traffic and one says voice traffic. So when you get a cell phone, the voice traffic says whoever your carrier is, AT&T, Verizon or whatever. And then the same for the data field, but for a landline, the data field is empty. So when you send a text message from your cell phone to a landline, it just goes to nowhere because it doesn't know where to route it. So by taking over provisioning the landline for voice traffic or data traffic, we're saying route that to the operator system.Richard Moot: I see. And so does this require any kind of physical component or is this actually something that's like they just, it's done within at the carrier level?Binh Ly: It's all at the carrier level.Richard Moot: I see, okay.Binh Ly: Yeah, so to actually utilize this capability, you just need authorization from the business that owns the landline. And so they just signed their name on a letter of authorization and we submit that to the carriers and then a few hours later, traffic starts flowing through. So that's one of the moments of delight for the customer is that they didn't realize this was happening. They signed up and they started getting traffic coming in and they're like, I didn't tell anyone we can do this. So I'm like, it's already happening all day every day and now you're getting access to it.Richard Moot: So what you're saying there is have some businesses signed up for this and suddenly without even prompting of people are getting text messages and didn't realize that people were texting them this whole time? Yes. Wow.Binh Ly: YesRichard Moot: WowBinh Ly: So a lot of missed business happens this way. We just saw, we signed up a window tinting business without telling any of their customers. They're getting requests, can I get a quote on this tint? If they didn't have the service, they would not know ...
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    41 mins
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