Top all-time · #10233
Alvaro Duran
Personal blog · news.alvaroduran.com · on HN as ohduranprogrammingbusiness
Alvaro Duran writes The Payments Engineer Playbook, a personal blog at news.alvaroduran.com about programming and business. Since 2023, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 73 times, most often “Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Alvaro Duran's Payments Engineer Playbook as a resource on payments and financial systems. One commenter says it has occasional distributed systems insights, and one of its posts reached the HN front page.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The only publication on Earth tailor-made for the builders of money software.
Most-linked posts?
- Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-09-11
- Raft Consensus in 2k Words2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-11-12
- How Modern Treasury Invented Event Locking2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-11-20
What Hacker News says?
> where there was a bug in a system designed by Fujitsu To clarify, there was not _one_ bug, but hundreds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal#Pr... From my read of the information publicly available, there was a fundamental lack of distributed/transactional system understanding from the developers at Fujitsu. This[1] article recently posted here[2] reminded me of the Post Office Scandal. The l…
Comment linking /p/engineers-do-not-get-to-make-startup
on “Proposed amendment to legal presumption about the reliability of computers”Submitted Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers as a story · 590 points
HN discussionCheck out The Payments Engineer Playbook[0]. I don't work on financial systems but I'm subscribed and like the occasional distributed systems insights. One of the posts turned up on HN front page a year ago[1]. Thats how I discovered it 0. https://news.alvaroduran.com/ 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42269227
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?”Submitted How Uber tests payments in production as a story · 227 points
HN discussionSubmitted We Love Writing Software So Much, We're Willing to Do It for Free as a story · 42 points
HN discussionSubmitted NoDB: Processing Payments Without a Database as a story · 26 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Prototype's Language as a story · 25 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Payments Engineers Should Avoid State Machines as a story · 24 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to build 99.999% uptime payment systems as a story · 18 points
HN discussionSubmitted Exactly-Once Payments at Airbnb as a story · 9 points
HN discussionSubmitted Engineers Do Not Get to Make Startup Mistakes When They Build Ledgers as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Advice I Wish I Had Known When I Built My First Payment Application as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Raft Consensus in 2k Words as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Stripe Deploys 1k Times a Day and You Don't Deploy on Fridays as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Engineers Do Not Get to Make Startup Mistakes When They Build Ledgers as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Nobody Gets Fired for Choosing Java as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Nobody Got Fired for Uber's $8M Ledger Mistake? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Raft Consensus in 2k Words as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Richard Pryor Stole a Lot of Half Cents and Bought a Ferrari as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted RIP Amazon QLDB as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Joy of Being on Call for Payment Systems as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Database Migration Wartime Stories as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Code-First Reliability in Payment Systems as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Technical Face of Payments as a Service as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Leveraging Spaced Repetition to Power My Weekly Newsletter as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted 5 Common Antipatterns in Payment Systems Design as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Payments Patterns: Elements of Reusable Money Software as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hard-Won Insights as a Service: The Value of Payments Orchestration as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted How Modern Treasury Invented Event Locking as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Dynamic Linking, and the Limitations of 2FA in Payments as a story · 2 points
HN discussion