Protocol tracking tools. When a spec changes, we know what it touches.
Switchboard · Internal tooling
The problem
A protocol change does not arrive in one place. A commit lands in a repository, a documentation page is edited, a vendor posts release notes, a schema gains a field. These rarely move together, and reading all of them by hand every week does not scale.
What Switchboard watches
Switchboard follows four kinds of source for each protocol we track: the spec repositories on GitHub (commits, tags and releases), the published documentation and spec sites, vendor changelogs and blog announcements, and the schemas themselves.
What it does with a change
When a source moves, Switchboard produces a diff: exactly what changed between one version and the next, down to individual schema fields. It then gives the change an impact rating, which tells us whether it affects the connectors we build and maintain.
- Source changes
- Diff
- Impact rating
- Catalog fields
The data layer beneath it
Every protocol asks for merchant data. Switchboard keeps a record of which catalog fields each protocol version needs, so a change in a spec can be traced to the specific fields it affects in a merchant's catalog.
How this helps our clients
The connectors we install stay in step with the specs, because we see changes when they are published rather than when something breaks. When a new version changes what a protocol needs from a catalog, we know which fields are involved before we open the merchant's data.