I’ve been a tech lead for about a year now and I’m not dead yet.
That’s not a lot of time in the grand scheme of a working life, but since tech lead years are like dog years I’ve got a battle scar or two. These are some of lessons they’ve taught me.
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This is the fifth article in a series of blog posts about our transition towards Stripe as Airtasker’s main payment provider.
In Part 3, we made a decision. We unleashed Stripe onto our system before our poster’s credit cards were migrated, creating two concurrent streams of payment. I shouldn’t say it was a damn fine call, since the impact was more due to serendipity than insight, but damn was it a fine call.
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This is the fourth article in a series of blog posts about our transition towards Stripe as Airtasker’s main payment provider.
Despite all the excellent work getting our own system ready to accept Stripe tasks, we had one glaring omission. Our taskers are paid their hard-earned funds into bank accounts, which were stored and tokenised in the ecosystem of our old payment provider. We had about a quarter of a million of these. If we wanted our taskers to continue to get their money, we needed to add these bank accounts to Stripe.
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This is the third article in a series of blog posts about our transition towards Stripe as Airtasker’s main payment provider.
February 2018, we launched in the UK. We’d be lying if we said there weren’t hiccups — we certainly had a few bugs to clean up and a lot of work getting to feature parity with our old provider. But, most importantly, it worked. It worked great.
Our MVP was proven. Stripe’s architecture was meshing well with our own system and everyone was happy. Developers loved working with the pristine Stripe API. Support agents loved the cleaner interface. DevOps loved the zero downtime. Our UK team loved that we could actually accept payments in London. And finance loved how much money we were saving.
Given how well-received it was, there was only one option: get it on Australia.
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This is the second article in a series of blog posts about our transition towards Stripe as Airtasker’s main payment provider.
When you start from ground zero, switching payment providers is an intimidating project. Airtasker hosts around 4000 tasks a day, which adds up to a fair amount of dollarydoos moving through our payment system from poster to tasker. That’s not something you want to mess with. It’s as critical to Airtasker as you can get.
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This is the first article in a series of blog posts about our transition towards Stripe as Airtasker’s main payment provider.
It’s 2017. You’re a rapidly scaling start-up trying to launch globally, but your payment provider (face blurred to protect their identity) isn’t available outside Australia. What do you do?
Switch to Stripe, of course. And that’s what Airtasker did.
ReadBecause I’m a fair hand at maths and even better at being late to parties, I’ve been meaning lately to play around with some data science. However, I ran into a few dilemmas setting myself up:
To solve these problems, after discussing it with a good friend of mine and finding out he had a similar setup himself, I decided to host a Jupyter notebook on a free tier EC2 instance. Thereby being able to access it from anywhere!
ReadRecently at my work we had a client who wanted to routinely dump data via FTP onto our production server.
We set up a user account for them to use. However, to maximise security, we also wanted to:
What seemed a straightforward process became more complex, mostly due to some UNIX idiosyncrasies with chroot jails and file permissions.
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