The Payments Engineer Playbook

The Payments Engineer Playbook

Home
Notes
Archive
About

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.
 • 
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
 • 
Alvaro Duran
Payment State Machines Are Not Cyclical
If your diagram is going back to a previous state, you're doing it wrong
 • 
Alvaro Duran
Leveraging Spaced Repetition to Power My Weekly Newsletter
The Payments Engineer Playbook, April Cools edition
 • 
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
 • 
Alvaro Duran
The Best Payments Database Is the One You Aren't Using
Second-order thinking applied to tech stack selection
 • 
Alvaro Duran
2
Caching In the Past Is a Rare Event
How domain knowledge turns caching into an easy problem
 • 
Alvaro Duran

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
 • 
Alvaro Duran
2
Why Orchestration Matters To Payments Engineers
System mitosis, Tech companies as federations, and you
 • 
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
© 2025 Alvaro Duran Barata
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start writingGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture