Archive - The Payments Engineer Playbook

NoDB: Processing Payments Without a Database

Making payments simpler and more reliable by removing databases out of the way.

Dec 18 •

The Playbook's 2024 Year In Review

The most popular and most important articles on The Payments Engineer Playbook in 2024.

Dec 11 •

Consistency, Availability, Prowess: How Stripe and Shopify push the limits of distributed payments

Changes on the infrastructure, noticing what the CAP theorem really means, and scaling like crazy.

Dec 4 •

November 2024

How to build 99.999% uptime payment systems

In order to keep pace with state-of-the-art, money software must work for all possible databases

Nov 27 •

How Modern Treasury Invented Event Locking

Race conditions are the nastiest problem in money software. They've forced engineers to make wrong design choices. Not anymore.

Nov 20 •

Payment for Payment Flow: How revenue sharing agreements impact payment orchestration

Markets that compete on volume often share some of their revenue with their intermediaries

Nov 13 •

Apple Pay as a Digital Check

Adopting modern encryption to credit card payments

Nov 6 •

October 2024

Dynamic Linking, and the limitations of 2FA in Payments

Authentication is what matters when money movement is centralized. But figuring out who you are is a process where you are the weakest link.

Oct 30 •

Exemptions and Data Science: The European Way of Building 3DS

When to hedge fraud risk, and when not to, in the land of strict regulation.

Oct 23 •

The Customer Must Never Know: The American Way of Building 3DS

3DS is the great equalizer for online payments. But in the US, it is not mandatory. This has more significance than you might expect for engineers.

Oct 16 •

How to design mixed payment methods with store credits

Scaling a convenient alternative to cash refunds sows the seeds for a multi-method payment system, and a sophisticated loyalty program

Oct 9 •

The Payments Engineer Playbook Is Going Paid in 2025—Here's What You Need to Know

Level up your expertise in payments systems and support the ongoing publication of this newsletter.

Oct 2 •

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