The Payments Engineer Playbook

The Payments Engineer Playbook

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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
3RI Is A Technical Lever
Saving your customers from the annoying 3DS challenges, especially when they aren't around to perform them.
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Alvaro Duran
Welcome to The Playbook!
3 Articles To Start Building Payments Software
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Alvaro Duran

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.
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Alvaro Duran
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
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Alvaro Duran
Payment State Machines Are Not Cyclical
If your diagram is going back to a previous state, you're doing it wrong
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Alvaro Duran
Leveraging Spaced Repetition to Power My Weekly Newsletter
The Payments Engineer Playbook, April Cools edition
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Alvaro Duran
3

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
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Alvaro Duran
The Best Payments Database Is the One You Aren't Using
Second-order thinking applied to tech stack selection
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Alvaro Duran
2
Caching In the Past Is a Rare Event
How domain knowledge turns caching into an easy problem
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Alvaro Duran
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