The Payments Engineer Playbook

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January 2025

Meta's Card Catastrophe: Payments as Corporate Benefits
A group of hackers was fired precisely for the kind of behavior that tech companies typically reward—finding technical loopholes.
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Alvaro Duran
Banks move money by sharing files, and that's OK
Engineers' efforts to build banking APIs have failed because they're approaching bank transfers the wrong way
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Alvaro Duran
A Tale of Two Ledgers
How the boundaries between the conflicting ledger modes inform the design of a ledger that could do both.
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Alvaro Duran
The Intuition of Money
An effective set of concepts for building money software
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Alvaro Duran
Payments Patterns: Elements of Reusable Money Software
Laying the foundations for a builder-centric catalog of payment methods
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Alvaro Duran

December 2024

NoDB: Processing Payments Without a Database
Making payments simpler and more reliable by removing databases out of the way.
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Alvaro Duran
1
The Playbook's 2024 Year In Review
The most popular and most important articles on The Payments Engineer Playbook in 2024.
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Alvaro Duran
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.
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Alvaro Duran

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
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Alvaro Duran
1
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.
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Alvaro Duran
6
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
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Alvaro Duran
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