The Payments Engineer Playbook

The Payments Engineer Playbook

Home
Notes
Archive
About

databases

How To Prevent Cache Stampedes
Think cache invalidation and naming things are hard?
 • 
Alvaro Duran
What Makes DynamoDB a Good Database Choice for Payments
A database engine for the always-on payments era.
 • 
Alvaro Duran
2
The ID Gapless-Latency tradeoff
You can get unique identifiers at scale either by Coordinating or by Centralizing ID creation. But you can't get gapless sequences without having to…
 • 
Alvaro Duran
Database Migration Wartime Stories
And some PostgreSQL not-so-well-known lock workarounds
 • 
Alvaro Duran
NoDB: Processing Payments Without a Database
Making payments simpler and more reliable by removing databases out of the way.
 • 
Alvaro Duran
1
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
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
 • 
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
Why Payments Engineers Should Avoid State Machines
Event-driven money software is replayable and pull-based. Why are state machines still prevalent in payments?
 • 
Alvaro Duran
1
The Most Important Book In Payments Is a Data Systems Book
Challenging the belief that good software design isolates business concerns on the domain layer.
 • 
Alvaro Duran
Boring Is Good: How Shopify Prepares for Black Friday
“Today’s Black Friday is tomorrow’s base load” attitude has powered the evolution of Shopify's multi-tenant data architecture.
 • 
Alvaro Duran
How To Scale Payment Systems With The Saga Pattern
What a database paper can teach us about scaling payment systems beyond a single relational database
 • 
Alvaro Duran
4
© 2025 Alvaro Duran Barata
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start writingGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture