The Payments Engineer Playbook

The Payments Engineer Playbook

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February 2025

3 Ways You Can Improve Your Payments Authorization Rate Right Now
If you see PSPs as fairly good chess players, these ways will help you check mate them
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Alvaro Duran
Why Orchestration Matters To Payments Engineers
System mitosis, Tech companies as federations, and you
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Alvaro Duran
Hard-won Insights as a Service: The value of Payments Orchestration
As the traditional tools for payment performance gets commoditized away, their complement gets scarcer, less replicable, and more valuable.
 • 
Alvaro Duran
If Amazon Can't Figure Out How To Make Money From Blockchain Databases, Nobody Can
Amazon is sunsetting QLDB; if you're a user, your only remaining option is to build it.
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Alvaro Duran

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

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