Why PayPal jumped the software-hardware gap

A software company reaches into the physical world with hardware.

PayPal is a software company, but when I met with Josh Bleecher Snyder, director of software engineering at PayPal, it was to talk about hardware. He’s leading the development of Beacon, PayPal’s new hands-free payment platform. At its heart is a finger-size stick that uses Bluetooth Low Energy to connect with mobile phones and confirm identity.

Paypal’s move into hardware extends its software into the physical world — a key idea behind our Solid Conference. What was once a system confined to screens and keyboards is now part of a new set of interactions in brick-and-mortar stores.

Beacon is part of a vast PayPal stack, and Bleecher Snyder’s team solved problems with a blend of hardware and software thinking — writing code in Go that was efficient enough for Beacon’s processor to be underclocked and avoid overheating, and to anticipate attacks on PayPal’s service that might come from compromised hardware. His entire system hews to PayPal’s “don’t be creepy” mantra by quickly and permanently discarding data that isn’t used in transactions.

In the interview below, we talk about the development that went into Beacon (PayPal uses Go — and has open-sourced its work), how to guide collaboration between hardware and software engineers, and the importance of software updates that improve a piece of hardware even after it’s in the customer’s hands.

This post is part of a collaboration between O’Reilly and PayPal exploring the convergence of hardware and software. See our statement of editorial independence.

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