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by abalone 2474 days ago
Wow, looks like Square is updating its github repository in response to this thread! Just saw they pinned their SDKs. Good job Square, that helps.

Square if you're listening, also work on the docs and dev experience. For example I noticed that Stripe's docs immediately show you how to work with charges. Whereas with Square the first step is... setting a location. It's just another little dev experience hurdle. What if I don't have a location? What if I'm an online store that spans all my locations? Stripe has put a lot of attention to detail here. Pinning repos is just the tip of the iceberg.

This is important because developer mindshare matters. For instance it seems like lots of devs here think this stripe capital product is novel/brilliant, a testament to wunderkind founders, etc. etc. That's all Stripe doing an A+ job grabbing and holding developer mindshare. GET ON IT SQUARE.

P.S. I think my characterization about the SDK stars is correct. They have some other open source projects that are very popular, but their SDK is trailing way behind Stripe by this measure (even years old repos), by like a couple orders of magnitude.

1 comments

[Square employee, on Developer Relations team]

We are most definitely listening. We appreciate the feedback and are always looking to improve our developer experience. Stripe has done an excellent job in that regard.

If you would be open to it, we'd really like to chat with you on your thoughts about our SDKs & documentation. Feel free to shoot an email to moot@squareup.com or message our Twitter @SquareDev.