The Playbook's 2025 Beach Reads
I love reading on the beach.
Time slows. You settle your chair on the sand, lean back, and let the distant cries of seagulls and the hush of waves create the atmosphere. Then, you put on the sunglasses, crack open the Kindle, and lose yourself in it.
Ocassionally, you glance up. A few blinks later, you’re caught up again into your reading.
This week, I’m putting together a few of the most engaging articles from The Payments Engineer Playbook for you to read, peruse, and immerse into.
I’ve organized them into topics so that going from one article to the next is seamless.
You know: glance up, and caught up again.
Payments Patterns, State Machines, and Antipatterns
A running theme of The Playbook is the painful realization that engineers new to payment systems assume that what worked on other domains will work here.
Assumptions like this lead to design decisions that are tough to fix in retrospect.
These articles will put you on the right track when designing systems to accept payments from your customers.
Learning Ledgers and Making Cents Dance
Many engineers heard of The Payments Engineer Playbook for the first time because of my startup experience building a single entry ledger.
I’ve collected some of my learnings from that time into a few articles already.
Orchestration means Performance
Payments performance means different things to different companies. This ambiguity is reflected in the cottage industry of providers that call themselves “orchestrators”.
We’ve looked at these Payment Orchestration platforms from a few angles.
Hope you have a wonderful summer. I’ll see you next week.