Get the latest tech news

Why Payments Engineers Should Avoid State Machines


Event-driven money software is replayable and pull-based. Why are state machines still prevalent in payments?

Scroll for five minutes on Youtube and you’ll find tons of tutorials that show you how to pass software design interviews that use payment systems. Most of the problems of scaling money software come from the fact that they have to be strongly consistent (everything has to be accounted for) and highly available (every second of downtime is a second when the company is not selling). Rather than hiding that information from the client, payments engineers should build common libraries that make the process of state reconstruction consistent across the client-server divide.

Get the Android app

Or read this on Hacker News

Read more on:

Photo of state machines

state machines

Photo of payments engineers

payments engineers

Related news:

News photo

Versioned finite-state machines with Postgres (2019)