Designing a Settlement System
Settlement is the part of a payments business that nobody talks about and everybody fights about in production. It is the machinery that takes the noisy stream...
11 min359Read →
Tagged #engineering — Page 4
Connection Pooling and Why It Matters
Most of the worst production incidents I have managed in fintech did not start with a dramatic failure. They started quietly, with a service that was perfectly...
12 min926Read →
Building a Notification Service That Scales
Notifications look like a small feature until you operate one at scale. Then you discover that the humble "we just send the customer an email" requirement is...
12 min781Read →
The Right Way to Run a Postmortem
Every engineering organization eventually learns that incidents are not the exception. They are part of the operating model. Systems fail, dependencies...
11 min1001Read →
Tokenization vs Encryption for Card Data
Every few months a product manager or a board member asks me some version of the same question: "We encrypt the card numbers, so we are PCI compliant and safe,...
11 min441Read →
Circuit Breakers and Graceful Degradation
Every distributed system fails. That is not a pessimistic statement; it is an operational one. In the payments platforms I have run, the question was never...
11 min745Read →
Building a Culture of Documentation
Every engineering organization I have led has reached the same uncomfortable moment. A senior engineer leaves, a critical incident hits at two in the morning,...
12 min621Read →
Database Indexing for Application Developers
Most application developers treat the database as a black box. They write a query, it returns rows, and as long as the page loads in under a second nobody asks...
11 min720Read →
Designing for Audit Trails from Day One
Every fintech founder I have worked with eventually has the same uncomfortable conversation with an auditor, a regulator, or a partner bank's risk team. The...
11 min975Read →
Background Jobs in .NET: A Practical Guide
Every payments platform I have worked on eventually grows a second nervous system. Alongside the request-response code that answers an API call in...
11 min361Read →
Understanding Webhook Signatures
Almost every fintech integration I have shipped eventually grows a webhook surface. Card networks, payment processors, KYC vendors, ledger systems, and...
10 min431Read →
API Versioning Strategies
Every API I have shipped in a regulated payments environment eventually outlives the assumptions it was born with. A field that was optional becomes mandatory,...
11 min523Read →