Hi there 👋🏿

This is a deep dive in payment for developers. The purpose of this rather lengthy article is to show in a very simple way how payment works, while always relating and linking it to the overal progress in technology: servers and security. Fintech and payment is my personal passion and for many years I have been working with teams, business people, tech founders, banks, regulators, international companies and I feel I have a thing or two to help developers with. It is also intended for this guidline to work particularly well for backend and servers developers since I believe majority of complexity lies in there. You will see lots of graphs and I’d highly recommend you to click on them to enlarge them and look at them thoroughly. I have came to realize, personally, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Another angle that this article is trying to push for is “learning by example”. We are following a practical approach with less focus on jargons and theory, and more on the whys and hows. Working with noebs, an open source payment gateway has also left us with a solid open source foundation and ready codebases that curious developers can tap into for even more practical examples. The intention was never to write a book, that would never be possible for my time and resources. Another consideration (reads big catch) is that I deliberately dropped citation and referneces. Usually that is a big red flag, but in my defence I was eager to get a first publishable draft out of my way; and with the advent of chatbots and AI, it became practically trivial to throw in the whole text to any free chatgpt-ish service and ask it for resources. But mostly it was for my personal convenience: listing and citing resources would have added a considerable burden on me that I just was not able to do. Lastly, I wrote this preface after I finished a draft version of this article, so there’s that. ...

I have stopped writing since roughly 2023. In part because war had changed my perspective on things. But that perhaps for another article. The main reason though that I stopped writing was due to AI: I felt lack of originality and I also tend to em a lot. But here we are 2 3 years later after we were promised chatgpt and artificial general intelligence are bound to happen. The goal of this post, albeit of the bumpy start is about software the engineering part. I’d like to share some of the small things that usually you learn somehow but you rarely find them in a textbook. Or a youtube video. They are nonetheless pre-requisites and everyone just assumes you have prior knowledge. ...

Designing a software program that can work efficiently very well, and testable in that new features and enhancements can be added to it is a bit of work. The way I approach can often be labeled as a lazy or naive way. That is a fair statement. I believe a good design is the simple one. A simple design is iterative in its nature, always assume that your first version of your program is a beta one. Even if your program was the best, it might not meet the expected requirements, or the requirements might have just changed. ...

Since December 19th, 2023 (the fall of Medani) i couldn’t at all picked up on coding, or doing any career-related activities. Impulsively tried to work super hard in the next week post Medani fall just to escape from all of the worries and fears and laser focus on my https://nil.sd work. I have always been excellent on isolating my work from my life. I recall I was hesitant to take couple of days off to attend my late grandma funeral back when i was TAing at uofk. I went to the dean and he told me i was not supposed to come that earlier and I could have taken some extra days off. ...

I never thought there was actually a name for this which adds to how fiasco the whole thing is. But back to one of my earliest companies, my colleague had a very interesting encounter. After months of working really hard he felt the need to ask for a much deserved raise. So went by the HR and completed everything and they told him that he’ll get a raise as per the company’s ladder effective next month. To his much surprise the next month, his net salary actually dropped (that’s your take-home amount). So he stormed to the HR and he’s arguing how could they demote him whilst they promised a pay-raise. The HR explained to him there was a glitch (Tax Bracket Creep) while his gross salary increased (5000), his net salary dropped because he’d have to pay the full 25% social insurance deductions. ...

And then there’s this special person to my heart, mind, and soul ...

If you know me any better you’d know that I have been yearning for a mattress for quite sometime now, wrote a blog post about it even 2 years before. And i have been grinding to fix it 2 years prior to that. I have never really fixed it, i know the solution: just buy a damn mattress. Side quests and side battles are important to give you some long due rests and rare sense of victories. Post war I had to abruplty leave my apartment and likewise Sudan. It possessed new challenges for me: i lost everything on a blink of an eye and some 10 months later I’m yet to fathom the full scale of that. I have been finding myself occupying my time with some odd activities nonetheless: extra coding, walking for hours, and amongst all having those white-fights with my roommates, who’s tasked to do chores, run errands etc. The fights in particular are quite a thing though: not only do they allow me to peacefully channel out anger, but they also serve as a purpose. To have those rather win-full battles where no harm can be inflicted and they are a good source for cheap testosterone too. ...

Thinking too far ahead about one’s life while advisable can often yield wrong outputs. A simple strategy would be to diversify your portfolio and invest in a variety of things. Investment here is not strictly financial: time and your own effort are also investments. You don’t know what will gonna happen in the next five years from. A good example for survivorship bias to say. We don’t have that crystal clear view, the magic the unravel the future and the secret of the universe. ...

Something I didn’t share this year yet but I was wondering what did I learn this year. What was the summation of it. Yeah the war inevitably had inflicted serious weight over other things. Surviving that on its own is rather a huge win. But what I came to realize is that I learned to be much better aware at the things I have had the pleasure to have. That I started to actually appreciate things and to not take things for granted. The smallest gesture of kindness, the smallest favor – those very small things which would have gone unnoticed by me, I became more aware about them. ...

O love o life and the question of the spirit. And our constant pursuit to seek absolution. I no of nothing that keeps me pushing through as though love. The only fuel that drives us onward and upward. But you never really feel its aura unless you have it, you don’t necessarily feel how important love can be unless after you are there you are trapped - and only leave a wreck of a sunken ship. So powerful yet so disastorous. And the fate o the fate, fate is so good at ridculing our hopes and promises, and tearing apart our loved ones. I have this thing where i firmly believe if you declare, you are at a higher risk it won’t happen. But I’m stepping up this time. Not though as much to challenge fate, but just to ask for forgiveness that i shall declare my love. I find so much beauty to spread out love than just keeping it a secret between the two lovers. The blockade on love is next to a war against humanity. Then why on earth humanity always have always had weddings, don’t you think? To showoff and celebrate love. ...