What Happens When You Swipe A Credit Card?
- Alex Xu tl;dr: "Visa, Mastercard, and American Express act as card networks for clearing and settling funds. The card acquiring bank and the card issuing bank can be – and often are – different. If banks were to settle transactions one by one without an intermediary, each bank would have to settle the transactions with all the other banks. This is quite inefficient."featured in #335
Horrible Edge Cases To Consider When Dealing With Music
- Julien Voisin tl;dr: Julien highlights some of the challenges: "Weird" album names, albums without names, confusing names, long tracks up to 23 hours, tracks with different versions and more. Julien also links to the DB schema to show how to "tame this madness."featured in #305
Root Cause Of Failure, Root Cause Of Success
- Lorin Hochstein tl;dr: “Root cause of failure” doesn’t make sense in the context of complex systems failure, because a collection of control processes keep the system up and running. A system failure is a failure of this overall set of processes." Lorin draws an analogy to illustrate this and points to the fact that if there's no root cause of success, why should there be one for failure.featured in #251
AuthZ: Carta’s Highly Scalable Permissions System
- Aaron Tainter tl;dr: Aaron had to build a system that was scalable, fast & generic enough for any new products. Permission systems that are too simple lack the features to "support fine-grained access on single resources," and too complex the system might unravel a "whole policy of attribute-based permissions." Aaron runs through the creative approach taken.featured in #235