A Conversation with a Payments Architect
Twenty years of moving money, told over a very long coffee.
By Nadia Farouk
She has built payment systems on four continents and has strong opinions about idempotency keys.
Every outage I have seen in twenty years was a retry that somebody thought was safe.
We talked about the messages nobody reads, the failure modes nobody tests, and why she still sketches state machines on paper before writing code.