Notes for technical buyers.
The event contract, the signing boundary, and the parts of a gateway that are political even when the code is simple.
Designing adapters that do not try to own your ERP
Operations software earns trust by sitting between systems, not replacing them. The adapter layer is where that promise is kept or broken.
By Daniel Whitfield
Idempotency in payment intents: making retries boring
Every network call can be repeated. The only question is whether repeating it is safe.
By Daniel Whitfield
Confirmation policy is a business decision, not a constant
How many confirmations is enough? The honest answer depends on the network, the amount, and what you release when you say yes.
By Layla Haddad, Mohamed Saad
Reconciling stablecoin payments: a treasury operator's guide
Three records, one truth. How to tell what is owed, what is confirmed, and what is still in flight — without opening three tools.
By Layla Haddad, Daniel Whitfield
PostgreSQL patterns for payment ledgers
Integer money, append-only entries, balanced transactions, isolation levels, locking, and indexes — the database design that lets a payment record prove itself.
By Daniel Whitfield
Hardening a self-hosted payment gateway: a practical deployment guide
Network, containers, secrets, database, supply chain, and monitoring — the controls that matter when the software that moves value runs on your infrastructure.
By Daniel Whitfield
Building a webhook delivery system: the sender's side of the contract
Outbox, queue, signing, retries, dead letters, and observability — how to send events reliably to receivers you do not control.
By Daniel Whitfield
Indexing blockchain payments reliably: cursors, reorgs, and failover
How to watch a network without missing a payment or counting one twice — polling versus subscriptions, cursor management, backfill, and surviving a bad RPC provider.
By Layla Haddad, Mohamed Saad
Designing a payment state machine you can trust
States, transitions, guards, and invariants for a payment intent — with the SQL and TypeScript to enforce them, and the tests that keep them honest.
By Layla Haddad
Webhooks are a product surface
If the event contract is vague, the integration will be a night job forever.
By Daniel Whitfield
Signing boundaries in self-hosted gateways
The interesting question is never 'can it sign.' It is 'who is allowed to, and how do you prove it later.'
By Layla Haddad, Mohamed Saad