The Payments Engineer Playbook

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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.
 • 
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.
 • 
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
Apple Pay as a Digital Check
Adopting modern encryption to credit card payments
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Alvaro Duran

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.
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Alvaro Duran
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.
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Alvaro Duran
4
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.
 • 
Alvaro Duran
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