Table of contents
The Square Developer podcast explores the intersection of technology and innovation in the world of payments and beyond. Your host and Square Head of Developer Relations Richard Moot sits down with a series of guests this season walking you through the latest news, updates, and innovations in the Square developer ecosystem.
On today’s episode, we are joined by Binh Ly, mastermind behind the Operator app. We’re diving into the fascinating world of landline SMS. In this episode he shares how he started with Square’s rapid merchant onboarding which ultimately led him to creating a system that allows businesses to receive text message on their landlines. Learn how Operator app is helping businesses recover lost opportunities through smart communication solutions.
Guests
- Richard Moot, Square Head of Developer Relations
- Binh Ly, Operator App Founder
Full transcript
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. 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 to 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: Yes
Richard Moot: Wow
Binh 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 about that requirement. And the other cool thing is that it’s not replacing anything. You get the voice traffic still and now you get the data traffic. It’s up to the business owner how they want to respond. They can call ’em back if they want that hyper personal touch or just text back, which majority of the customers who interact with the platform prefer that just text, send text, and off you go.
Richard Moot: I mean, I’m guilty of that. I’ve been so stoked in the recent years that more and more businesses are allowing texting directly to these lines because it’s been able to reschedule. I mean, giving my car serviced at this local car shop, it’s so much easier that I get a little text message, Hey, your car’s ready and you text back and great, I’ll be there by two and I don’t have to answer a phone call meetings all day. Most of the time I just let that go to voicemail and then I hope that I can text ’em back to say, Hey, I’ll be there. So it’s so convenient.
Binh Ly: That voicemail aspect is also a really interesting component of the customer communication. We found that people don’t leave voicemails. So if someone calls you miss the call and then they don’t leave a voicemail, it’s really hard to have any context around that. So we invented this technique where if you call the landline, someone calls your landline and if no one picks up, the system will text you back from that landline number. So it’s not a spooky experience with a caller. If you called one number, then you got a text back from another number saying, Hey, I saw that you called. It’s kind of a weird experience. So you probably ignore that too. But if you call one number and you get text back from the same number, the response is pretty immediate.
Richard Moot: Yeah, I mean it’s so validating because like the phone number for a lot of businesses, this is a form of identity for them. And so by keeping it all within that one thing, it feels very cohesive. You can trust it. I’ve definitely had this spooky thing happen where I call one place and then I get a text back from another and I’m like, I feel like I’m being, this is a weird phishing thing going on.
Binh Ly: Yes.
Richard Moot: You definitely don’t want to have more of that.
Binh Ly: Exactly. And a lot of businesses don’t realize until you point it out to them that their phone number is part of their branding. So if you drive by auto shops or something, you’ll see the name of the business and sometimes the phone number is just as large in the typeface. So now you can maximize the utilization of that number, put a simple call or text this number in. In comes the traffic.
Richard Moot: And so you have this technology of being able to do this SMS routing, and then you built an app for R Square hackathon and you won. Tell us a little bit about more what you built and why you built it for the hackathon.
Binh Ly: Yes. So the project that won the hackathon in 2022 was not the project that I started with. The initial project was digital appointment cards. So if you book through Square Appointments today, you’ll get an email and in that email are a couple of links to add to your calendar. That’s over email. But if you think about in real world scenarios and medical practices, for example, or dental, you go in, you do your checkup or whatever at a dental office and they say see the front desk before you leave. So you go out there and they say they want to see you in six months, they put it into their system and then they write down your information on a card and hand it to you. So it’s on you to either remember that forever until the appointment or enter it into your own calendar. So I didn’t know at the time that Square sent that email that lets you add to the calendar. So I thought, let’s do that over SMS, but I built that those tied in Square Appointments and it sent you a text where you can add it to your calendar. Then we saw that you could do that over email. I was like, oh no, this is the saddest thing, all this work. Then I vaguely recalled an article I saw on your website about the number of no-show and cancellations,
And it reminded me that it’s like the missed call thing. Again, if you don’t figure out how to respond to that, you’re going to lose it hundred percent. So we looked into how do we, could we hijack that process? If there’s a no-show or a cancellation, can we help the business try and recover that? At least take a shot at it, right? 50/50 chance of getting that business. So that was the genesis of that.
Richard Moot: And to be honest, we were very inspired by that because being able to recoup even half or a quarter of those no-shows is that could be the difference between making or breaking it in a given month or quarter for a business. And I think the other part that you had mentioned previously that was also really impressive is say somebody has an appointment, they called in, they didn’t leave a voicemail, maybe they wanted to reschedule, with Operator, you can actually just send a message back like, Hey, what did you need help with? Or maybe even be smart and look up like, oh, does this person have a booking? Were they trying to reschedule? There’s so many different kind of workflows that can spring from that touch point.
Binh Ly: Yes, and I think the recent advent of LLMs has really helped and how that is experienced because the hackathon project, and this goes back to why people pick Operator over other messaging providers I guess you’d say, is that in the hackathon you can project, you can see that the cancellation campaign, when it sends out the sequence of text messages, you can customize all of those to use your own language. And the interesting thing is whether we’ve been experimenting with using LLMs for is it turns out it’s kind of hard and people also manage to mess up reply Y to confirm, or one to confirm they can fat finger that easily. We see it a lot in the logs when we’re helping the customers diagnose why some of the automations aren’t happening, but you can feed that into the LLM, like, look at this conversation, do you think they confirmed or not? And it turns out it’s really good at that. That’s one my favorite uses of it so far.
Richard Moot: And so the other thing I wanted to sort of touch on is that you have this product follow-ups, a part of Operator, but this is actually kind of grown beyond just sending messages for missed appointments, but there’s many other use cases. I was hoping that maybe you tell us some of the other use cases that people have had for this communication style.
Binh Ly:Yeah, so like I mentioned earlier, the customization of the messages is one of the big reasons people keep contacting us, and that’s not just over SMS. So one of the complaints, not complaints, I guess the feedback that we get about built-in appointment reminders is that they’re all the same.
So we allow our customers to customize that initial message and the follow-up message so it feels organic and on brand with how they do business. But that didn’t exist at the time of the hackathon project. And the other thing is that this capability has found, when we first envisioned it, it was for stylists, people we were most aware of with who deal with cancellation and no-shows, but the general awareness of Square’s, APIs, the Square appointment products, Square payments has really opened the door for Operator to kind of transition into a consulting business. Someone will say, I have this technical need or this problem, and I can say, okay, I know how to solve that with some software and very specific integrations.
Binh Ly: So Operator is being white labeled essentially next year in an unexpected way with a company called BeamReaders, and they’re a dental radiology company that will be using Operator’s infrastructure to communicate with patients. They have this new, this need where currently they operate kind of like an Uber for dental radiology, someone who needs a ride and Uber matches you with a driver. So in the current business for Beam readers, someone has a cone beam scan of their head, they need a radiologist to interpret it. So BeamMeters connects the two.
Richard Moot: Interesting.
Binh Ly: So now there are a plethora of these cone beam devices across the country, underutilized. So they’ll be launching kind of like an Airbnb, but for the cone beam.
Richard Moot: So for anybody who’s not familiar, give us the quickest way to understand what these cone BeamReaders are, what they’re used for.
Binh Ly: So typically you go to the dentist and you get an X-ray done. That X-ray is in 2D and dentists go to school and they’re trained to interpret 2D, but the cone beam technology is 3D and it captures more of you, not just a chunk, so maybe from the chest to the top of your head. So in that range of coverage, there could be diseases that the dentist is not trained to identify or address, but by law they are liable for that. So if you go get a cone beam scan, there’s some cancer somewhere in you, but the dentist doesn’t tell you they’re liable for that.
Richard Moot: Wild.
Binh Ly: BeamReaders exist to shift that liability, so you send the raw cone beam files to BeamReaders, they have radiologists on staff who will read through it and then write up a report, let you know that there’s something wrong or if it’s all good. So that’s the core business around that cone beam technology and if they’re getting adopted in other industries too. So we’re seeing it happen with chiropractors. So if you have a 3D view of someone’s neck, that’s really powerful and helpful.
Richard Moot: No, I mean as somebody, I have a pinched nerve in my neck and I had to go in, get an MR, I get steroid shots and I’m sure that somebody, at least with a better analysis of doing a 3D of my neck would see like, oh, is it the actual bones? Do I have bone spurs? They could rule that out much more quickly, and so yeah, I mean I definitely see there’s plenty of use cases there
Binh Ly: And that technology is being installed all over the place, but it’s very expensive. So by allowing other businesses that don’t have a cone beam to kind of rent the cone beam for a bit will just help grow the adoption and care coverage, essentially. More people will have access to this because of this software, but they’re thinking about using Square Appointments.
So if a practice has a cone beam and they want to sign up for BeamReaders Airbnb type product, they’re thinking maybe they can also sign up for a Square Appointments account. And those appointments, if someone’s referring a patient to your practice, you can put that into the Square because it’s not really your, so it doesn’t make sense to put them into your patient management system. So you put them in maybe something like Square and then facilitate all the communication over SMS. Because in my experience with Airbnb, at least, you book the place, you send the initial message to the property owner, but when you check in, they’re switching the SMS right away or iMessage, no one wants to log back in.
So the same thing we think will happen with the dental stuff. The patient does not know the practice that they’re going to get this cone scan. The more friction you can avoid, the better. So just send a text message directly to the patient from your landline and you’ll cover that communication gap immediately.
Richard Moot: Yeah, so one thing I want to circle back to is that issues around the liability, and then I’m curious on the Airbnb type component to this. Is that in part to maximize utilization of the cone beam? Because from what I would understand, they’re probably not cheap. So you still want to recoup the cost of it and maximize the use of it in order to make it worthwhile to have. So is this to make sure that people can find out where these things are and get these scans done? And then also to touch on the shifting of the liability there?
Binh Ly: So there’s actually two parts to the answer to that. So yes, the cone beam device is very expensive and dentists will acquire a machine and they don’t always use it because of the liability risk they have to pay for the report. So to provide the most amount of care, the best care, if you have this equipment, you have to incur a cost as the provider.
So the Airbnb model will help, hopefully at scale help to reduce lower that cost because you’re recouping some of that. But the other thing that BeamReaders is doing that will be doing that’s pretty innovative is that they will allow the provider to offer the patient the option of paying directly for it.
Richard Moot: I see.
Binh Ly: You’ll go in, they’ll say, look, we took a cone beam scan of you, but to ensure that there’s nothing wrong, we recommend that you get it reviewed by a radiologist. If you want to do that, then they’ll slide a Square terminal in front of you, the patient sticks their credit card in, and then the appropriate charges and fees get distributed. Everyone wins in that scenario.
Richard Moot: So shifting the patient in this instance is paying for this directly, that kind of shifts the liability that’s like no, it’s their scan that they’re paying for rather than something that the dentist does and orders and runs through insurance.
Binh Ly: Yes.
Richard Moot: That kind of helps in sort of shifting the liability that it’s now on the patient to sort of follow up with a radiologist or others?
Binh Ly: Yes
Richard Moot: I see. Well, I’d love to see the Square terminal device, just put it right in there. I know we have plenty of workflows to make that a little bit more seamless, but yeah, that’s really interesting that you can just do one simple change in the ordering of things or who’s paying for it can make that far more viable. Because one thing I know that we had talked about before doing the podcast here is the actual impact that this particular technology can have for people because of what it can see that you normally couldn’t. I don’t know if you want to sort of speak to that a little bit more.
Binh Ly: Yes. I asked, I think recently, what percentage of scans come on a day-to-day basis. When a scan comes in, how often do you see something dangerous? And the staff said every day, multiple times a day, people are just getting their scans sent in and there’s cancer or something else terrible. But it’s really wild to think that only a small percentage of the scans get sent in for this kind of review. That’s really scary. So anything that we can do to make it easier on all the parties involved to be like, this is a good thing to do, you should do it all four. And it has really huge implications for child development too. We’ve seen a couple of examples where you’ll see a child, it’s like bags under their eyes, they’re lethargic, bad, poor grades, they go get a scan, you can see the airways obstructed. So their devices that you can give to the child to help aid in the development of their face improve the airway. And after these things are administered six weeks to three months later, no very noticeable change in the child’s appearance and behavior
Richard Moot: And all just from being able to have a more detailed view of the whole passageway from using this 3D scan.
Binh Ly: Yes, and I used to really, I’ve been scanned twice and what I was able to see about myself was really eye-opening. So Asian people I guess naturally have smaller airways, but my airways are exceptionally narrow. It’s 72 millimeters.
Richard Moot: And what would be sort of a normal to just give us an understanding of the difference between 72 millimeters.
Binh Ly: I doubled that.
Richard Moot: Okay. Wow. Wow.
Binh Ly: Yeah, so I remember one year I put on my Christmas list to be able to run a mile. So I thought it was all kinds of fitness things, but it really is obstructed up here. The oxygen can’t come in to begin with.
Richard Moot: Yeah. Wow. That’s something I just wouldn’t even really think about.
Binh Ly: And it’s only possible because we have good tools now to back up someone’s educated guesses.
Richard Moot: Yeah, and it has me wanting to go get one because I’ve been diagnosed with a mild sleep apnea and I’m sure that it at least helped me rule out, do I have any kind of actual obstruction in here? Is there something that can be done about that? I’m sure something like that would be super helpful for that.
Binh Ly: Tremendously helpful. It adds up the longer you are apneic, the more damage to your body.
Richard Moot: Yeah, no, I mean I’ve learned over time, it feels silly to say this because of course sleep is important, but it’s when you don’t have good sleep that you start to learn how really, really important because it kind of just affects every other component of your life. And that’s why you talk about these children who are having obstructed airways and it’s just causing a perpetual issue and they’re at the most critical stage of development that to have an obstruction is just so much more dire.
Binh Ly: And as a parent, I’ve reflected upon the times where we thought that there was just bad behavior, but it turns out the body is signaling. So for example, bedwetting, night terrors, those are all signs that the child’s body is giving to you that it’s not getting enough air. So it’s trying to wake up the child to get more air. I’ve heard from a lot of parents, yeah, they just can’t stop wetting the bed or they’re frustrated for some reason their child is not developed, like all the other kids, I dunno, why they can’t grow up. It has nothing to do with that. You got to look at the airway.
Richard Moot: So weird segue, but I do want to circle back to some of the stuff that we talked about earlier with, because you mentioned about LLMs and I do recall we had sort of touched on some of the ways that you sort of evolved your product over time because as we know that SMS has become more regulated and so being able to go and get an account, I mean I think some of us has had this with the various API messaging companies, you have to go through a little bit more of a process. But then also you’ve kind of innovated on ways to help mitigate certain types of issues to enable your users to use your product in the way that they expect it to. So I don’t know if you want to, first let’s talk about the regulation piece. How has that sort of changed things for your business and how have you sort of reacted to it?
Binh Ly: Yeah, so around the start of the pandemic there was the formation of this entity called the Campaign Registry. And if you wanted to send SMS traffic from your software, you would have to register the phone number with this organization and then also specify the message payload. So give them a sample of what it is that you’re sending and then they approve it and once they approve it, you can start sending messages. But if you don’t do that, you can still send, but you’ll be charged a higher fee. I believe, at some point in time next year they’ll finally block it. If it’s unregistered SMS traffic, it’ll get blocked completely.
And it really seems like what they consider spam traffic feels more restrictive now. And so despite that, real businesses have real needs that they need the software for. So we started to notice that for one customer that uses it as an alert system, the first person on the pool of numbers gets alerted, and everyone else gets blocked. So that was causing a lot of frustration since these are moments of importance for business and they can’t afford to have these messages not be delivered. So that was the first time we ever used an LLM for anything. It was to rewrite the message, so it says given this recipient, this is their full name, rewrite this message and then send it to them. So the business, they compose the alert message however they want and then the LLM will rewrite that for each recipient and we cycle through three different providers for that. So to try to maximize, because even if you change the temperature sometimes you’ll still get back the exact same message and then it’ll get blocked. So it goes 1, 2, 3 anthropic, Open AI, Llama, and then just cycle through the numbers that way.
Richard Moot: I see. And so in your case of the alerting thing, it might be like say I’m going to give a contract example because I’m not going to mention what the specific case was, but say that we had an alert that a service went down, you want to message all the engineers who were on call previously, you’d be like, it’s just going to get to the first one of the list list that one goes through the rest from our blog. This would actually try to rewrite the message to make it more bespoke to each person on the list so that these look like a series of individual SMS, not one massive one.
Binh Ly: Correct.
Richard Moot: Yeah. I mean it’s a very interesting way of circumventing that because it’s like obviously there’s a need here, but at the same time, I know that in the last year I think that we’ve all gotten lots of SMS from political campaigns or from other organizations. And so it’s interesting to see how you can help a business be able to use this for a specific use case and not for something malicious, like sending a weird spam text to a bunch of random people.
Binh Ly: Yes, exactly. And the other interesting use case along the same lines was that we had one customer who would send out really long messages like up to 1200 characters and you can’t send that large of a message over SMS reliably because the carrier will break that up and then they’ll come in out of order. So they’ll compose it. Then we ask the LLM to break it down into bullet points and it can construct more sensible breaks in the long message that the carrier can. So that has both increased their throughput and if the message makes sense or not. So that was pretty neat that it can do that.
Richard Moot: And so one of the other things I want to just touch on just for the sake of having people understand how to go about building basically to help inspire those in the Square developer community, what did you first build Operator on in terms of backend languages, front end stuff, and how has that sort of evolved over time?
Binh Ly: Oh yes. So the very first version ever of the system was written with an Elixir (programming language).
Richard Moot: Oh wow.
Binh Ly: Using Phoenix because it had really strong web socket support. That was 2018 I think, and we had a mobile app that also connected. Since the Apple push notifications weren’t guaranteed, we also applied web socket usage there, but then Elixir and Erlang and the Beam, they’re kind of exotic technologies to me even to this day. So when I had to need it to rewrite the whole system, I did that in Ruby with Rails the fastest way to get it up. So it’s a webhook heavy system. So that’s how the carriers communicate with us. So thousands of webhook calls an hour.
And so despite that, the system is still really small. It’s a pretty small instance, at Amazon, we store every webhook message that comes in and process that on a background queue because the luxury of SMS is that the receiver doesn’t know when the message is coming. So it’s not like WhatsApp where you give them the little dots that someone’s typing that’s kind of unnecessary for business messaging.
They just know that the message is coming, so that buys us a little bit of time. So it’s a Rails app that uses Sidekick behind the scenes. So small Rails app with the Sidekick machine is kind of large.
Richard Moot: Awesome. And are there any other components? So it’s just staying with a Rails app. Are you using anything for any kind of front end components of this?
Binh Ly: In the newest or the latest version of Operator, it’s Rails. We just upgraded to Rails 8. It uses a lot of tailwind, but it tries to be as vanilla rails as possible though, because should something go wrong, I want to be able to just picture in my head where the problem could be.
Because my thing is I played a lot of hockey growing up and there’s this saying in hockey, if you’re a defenseman and you play a good game, no one says anything. No praise or anything, you play a bad game, everyone brings you up. So the messaging service is kind of the same way on a day-to-day basis. It’s quiet, there’s just message traffic, no support tickets. But when there’s a delay or the customer knows that someone’s texting them but they’re not receiving it, then it gets crazy real fast. So the system’s designed too, or I implement it in a way where I can quickly diagnose or try to quickly diagnose where the problem could be. So storing the webhooks in the database for 30 days, I can always replay things.
Richard Moot: Right. Well, I think you have a really, I can’t speak even more to how much your approach to that aligns in terms of that. As long as you’re doing everything that you’re supposed to be doing, everything should be quiet. But as soon as things go wrong, things are going wild. And I know from a design perspective within Square, the whole ideology was like to get out of the way of people running their business, the point of sale and all these things should not be hindering things. They should just be folding into the background. They should be seamless because we want, I mean, business owners just want to run their business and showcase what it is that they’re trying to sell or what it is that they’re trying to offer. And having stuff that gets in the way of that is not helping them. It’s hindering ’em. So it should be saving time and be reliable. And I’m sure with SMS, that’s what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to save them time and be reliable.
Binh Ly: Exactly. And I think a big influence on how this perspective on how to build it came from was actually visiting the customer on site. So if you go into a dental office and poke your head over the counter, they’re not using Studio Display and MacBook Pros, they have square monitors back there. These are people on older machines that they don’t really care about real-time refresh, but they know if they switch the focus to your browser and they refresh the page, they better come back up. That’s the bar. You cannot fail at that part. So we try to ensure that every single time.
Richard Moot: Totally agree on that. I mean, the amount of times that we end up looking at a redesign of a webpage and we just go, oh my gosh, this looks so amazing on this giant 4K ultra wide. And then you realize, yeah, the JavaScript payload on that is way too large and it takes forever to reload when you’re on this tiny little machine that is on a very unreliable wifi connection that’s not saving somebody time.
Binh Ly: Not at all, the other thing that really influenced the decision to go with Rails is the rails console. Whenever something seems off, I can just SSH in and connect and start looking at the data that way. That’s a really helpful tool for me. I think that’s why I don’t choose other tools. If they don’t have that ability, I can’t do it.
Richard Moot: Yeah, I mean there’s a power to convention over configuration. I think even as a developer, as I’ve evolved over time, I used to be really into building something with Express and Using React, and I love the customization of it. And as time has gone on, I’m like, I really wish there was a little bit more convention here. Everyone kind of develops their own conventions and it saves you a lot of time in your decision making because it gets you closer to solving the actual problem of you’re building a business, you’re building a service, that’s what you want to do, and convention gets you there much more quickly.
Binh Ly: Yes, for sure. And also the other hard learning was customers don’t really care about your stack.
Richard Moot: Yeah, no, they don’t.
Binh Ly: When I first graduated university, I worked at Real Networks, the makers of the Real player and my boss there, this C++ master. And he was really into generics and C++ templates, so that was kind of my worldview. Everything has to go through the C++ pipeline, otherwise you’re not a real programmer. But when you’re talking to a business owner, any mention of that kind of stuff, right over their head, they don’t care. They just want it to work. And so I just try to pick the thing that is the most solid that gets me there.
Richard Moot: Yeah, I could only imagine going to a Square seller and be like, Hey, do you want us to build this with a serverless technology stack that has edge functions? And I’m sure they just be like, I just need to work. I just want to take a payment and make a sale. I don’t care how it works.
Binh Ly: Yeah, exactly. Especially with Square merchants, they have the Square on their phone, so they always say, can I use it on my phone? They don’t want to have additional hardware or anything. It needs to meet them where they work primarily.
Richard Moot: A hundred percent. I mean, I think I’ve regularly had, when talking to members in our developer community or people who are wanting to participate in our hackathons and they’re building out all these web dashboards and other things, and most of the time I’m trying to encourage them understand that the Square seller spends most of their time sitting in the point of sale or sitting in the Square dashboard. That’s how they’re running a good chunk of their business. And so you don’t want to be trying to pull them out of this. You want to find a way to be injecting or hooking into this to compliment their workflow, not pull them out of it.
Binh Ly: It’s also really funny with the younger workforce, maybe this is not okay to say, but in talking to the owner, they talk about some of the friction that they have with their staff. They’re willing to do certain operations. I think having a mobile app for Operator is a big win because the staff is already on their phone doing whatever it is that they’re doing. If they can do their job from their phone, that’s one less battle you have to fight. It’s a job.
Richard Moot: Yeah, well, there’s something also I think sometimes interesting about, so I’ve talked about this, people on my team, and this isn’t necessarily with phones, but I feel like there’s times when working from home and having multiple monitors can suddenly be very distracting. Whereas if I pull my laptop out, I have single view, I’m single focused on a task, mobile devices that actually really lend well to this. You can only really be in one app at a time. And so when you’re in that app, you’re focused into what you’re working on there. Granted, I know we all switch between apps. I mean maybe not, but I know I switch between apps all the time on my phone, but at least when you’re in there, you’re focused and you’re working on this particular thing. So I do think that there’s a power to that to allow them to work in a constrained environment that keeps them focused
Binh Ly: A hundred percent. And recently, maybe in the last six weeks, I’ve discovered a super mode that I installed Linux on an old MacBook Pro, an M1 MacBook Pro, and it’s like my favorite development environment now because there’s nothing else on there. It’s just BS code and the Kitty terminal and that’s it. But you get the nice hardware feel. That was always a big barrier. I didn’t want to use a think pad with this weird track pad and things like that, but.
Richard Moot: Yeah, I’ve done that. I’ve done that all on a Linux build and I thought it was going to be great for me, and I ended up just quickly reverting back to my MacBook. So I think there, there’s definitely a power to having the good hardware component, but then the simplicity of like, Hey, all I have here is all my development tools. There’s nothing here to distract me.
Binh Ly: And then the dev containers were introduced in Res-7-2. Once I learned about that, I was like, I can’t imagine doing things without this.
Richard Moot: Yeah, I agree. Well, I see that we are coming up on our time here, so I’m going to say that that’s probably it for today. But I want to give a big thanks to Binh for joining us. Just so interesting, every time I’ve chatted with you to learn more about SMS, how landline SMS can work. If you could just let us know where can people go to learn more about Operator or follow up?
Binh Ly: Yes, so Operator is, like we mentioned before, it’s kind of white labeled and hasn’t been, you can’t sign up for Operator yet, but that will range in 2025 as we add sales staff to go out and evangelize some of these developments with the rest of the world. But I’m online at Binh Twitter and Instagram, just “Binh”. And then in 2025, you can go to Operatorapp.com to sign up, to start.
Richard Moot: Alright, well I think people should definitely go and check this out. For all of those listening, if you’ve got a project with Square, we’d love to hear about it. Please reach out to us on Discord or on X at SquareDev and don’t forget to subscribe and check out developer.squareup.com for more. Keep building and catch you next time.
