Archive - The Payments Engineer Playbook

April 2025

5 Common Antipatterns in Payment Systems Design

They're sensible approaches that end up becoming major obstacles for scale and maintenance down the road.

Apr 23 •

Never Make a Status Request Again: How to Communicate with PSPs

PSPs are satisfied when you receive the data you need, even if you get it multiple times

Apr 16 •

Payment State Machines Are Not Cyclical

If your diagram is going back to a previous state, you're doing it wrong

Apr 9 •

Leveraging Spaced Repetition to Power My Weekly Newsletter

The Payments Engineer Playbook, April Cools edition

Apr 1 •

March 2025

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Logistic Regression for Busting Payments Fraud

The slippery slope of ever more sophisticated models, and how easy it is for script kiddies to keep on outsmarting entire companies

Mar 26 •

The Best Payments Database Is the One You Aren't Using

Second-order thinking applied to tech stack selection

Mar 19 •

Caching In the Past Is a Rare Event

How domain knowledge turns caching into an easy problem

Mar 12 •

February 2025

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