The Payments Engineer Playbook

The Payments Engineer Playbook

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Code-First Reliability: 4 Unconventional Approaches to Always-on Payments
Today is the launch of my newest book, titled Code-First Reliability.
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Alvaro Duran
Database Migration Wartime Stories
And some PostgreSQL not-so-well-known lock workarounds
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Alvaro Duran
The Joy of Being On Call For Payment Systems
How to be at ease when every second counts
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Alvaro Duran
The Ultimate Guide to Payment Tokens
Tokens are the Beautiful Chaos of Payments: lots of innovation happening under the hood, and more of that keeps coming.
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Alvaro Duran
Why Payments Are Path-Dependent
A winning strategy to go around DNHs and improve payments authorization
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Alvaro Duran

June 2025

Code-First Reliability in Payment Systems
Building Payments to fail as soon as possible
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Alvaro Duran
2
Why Payments Aren't Money Movements
Payments are contracts, and require an ecosystem of tools on top of transfers
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Alvaro Duran
Ouch! What To Do When A Payment Fails
Categorizing errors, and learning to live with the disappointing Do Not Honor
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Alvaro Duran
Stripe Deploys 1,000 Times A Day And You Don't Deploy On Fridays
If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn
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Alvaro Duran

May 2025

Enterprises Hope That Python Will Make Them AI-first
Maybe the surprise isn't that they're trying to follow the hype, but that they're abandoning Java
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Alvaro Duran
The Technical Face of Payments as a Service
How can technology make payment processing easier? Let me give you 4 ways, and a litmus test.
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Alvaro Duran
The Regulatory Face of Payments as a Service
Unbundling ISOs, Expanding the Card Payment Ecosystem, Spreading Mass Confusion
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Alvaro Duran
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