Abstract
Most API design advice assumes a forgiving environment: retries are cheap, data has a single source of truth, and a slow response is only an inconvenience. Financial infrastructure assumes none of that. Card networks give you three seconds to auth or decline. Settlement takes days but fees post immediately. And if your ledger is off by a few cents, you might not find out until it's a legal problem.
During this talk, Fawziyah draws on her years building payments infrastructure to share four principles that make APIs more resilient under those conditions:
- Continuous reconciliation
- Edge case first design
- Latency under pressure
- Idempotency at scale
All four will make your APIs better whether or not they're moving money.
Speaker
Fawziyah Alebiosu
Software Engineer @Imprint
Fawziyah is a Software Engineer based in San Francisco. She works at Imprint, a Series D payments startup led by CTO and author Will Larson. She previously spent many years building merchant payment infrastructure as part of the Payments Facilitation team at GoDaddy. When she's not coding, she's playing tennis, lifting weights, or reading a good book
