The Case for Boring Technology in Fintech
A few years ago I sat in a postmortem for an outage that cost us most of a business day of failed settlements. The root cause was not a bug in anything we had...
A few years ago I sat in a postmortem for an outage that cost us most of a business day of failed settlements. The root cause was not a bug in anything we had...
The worst rules engine I ever inherited had 1,847 rules in a single database table, evaluated top to bottom, and the order they ran in was determined by the...
Of all the operational risks I worry about as a CTO in regulated payments, the one that keeps recurring in postmortems is not a fancy distributed-systems...
Of all the categories of bugs I have seen ship to production over a twenty-year career, the ones rooted in date and time handling are the most insidious. They...
Every payments platform I have worked on eventually grows a second nervous system. Alongside the request-response code that answers an API call in...
Every incident review I have ever sat through eventually arrives at the same uncomfortable question: what was the system actually doing at the moment it...
Every breach post-mortem I have read in the last decade has a secrets problem buried somewhere in it. A connection string in a config file checked into source...
Every engineer who has spent time near a payments ledger eventually learns the same lesson, usually at the worst possible moment: a reconciliation report is...
Every team I have led eventually hits the same wall: the schema needs to change, the business cannot tolerate a maintenance window, and the database underneath...
A new major .NET release arrives, and the team chat immediately splits into two camps: the people who want to upgrade this week because it is new, and the...
When a payment fails at 2am, the question is never "is something wrong." Your customers have already told you that, loudly, across every channel you have. The...
Security in a fintech API is not a feature you bolt on at the end, just before launch, when someone in compliance asks the uncomfortable question. It is a set...