Worth highlighting here: Stripe also publishes a software engineering magazine called Increment [1] that puts out some really high-quality articles -- on a different level than any of your standard "corporate eng blog" kind of stuff (and I love those!).
They focus their issues on different engineering topics: May 2021 was "Containers," August 2020 was "APIs," Feb 2019 was "Internationalization," you get the idea. Can't recommend it enough. Worth scrolling through the topics to one that hits close to your interests.
Nearest to my own heart is the "Frontend" issue [2] -- every article is fucking fascinating, and one of my favorites is a deep dive from Evan You, the author of Vue, about the decision to do a full rewrite for Vue 3.
I am endlessly impressed by the quality of writing that comes out of Stripe.
I am not surprised in the least, I think extremely highly of Patrick the CEO as he is very well read and imo is probably one of the most rounded leaders in tech. Just look at his booklist:
https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf
I assume this thoughtfulness matriculates down the organization where these high quality write ups originate.
"""
The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War Hardcover – August 31, 1969 by Donald Kagan (Author)
Kagan takes issue with Thucydides' view that the war was inevitable, that the rise of the Athenian Empire in a world with an existing rival power made a clash between the two a certainty.
"""
That's impressive. People pay too little attention to the matrix that's been popping out copies all these centuries.
I was about to, but they mentioned they’re releasing a collector’s box set of 19 issues in November. I figure if I’m paying international shipping I might as well wait.
Why does Stripe, a financial services company, continue having the most interesting UI on the web? Those sexy svg gradient backgrounds, those color palletes that go together so well that I don't see anywhere else, every logo and every icon and every font choice so thoroughly thought out. What attracts UI/UX talent of this caliber to Stripe?
I think that's their whole business model really, a beautiful skin and api on top of a very boring process that makes developers want to use it. Stripe itself doesn't really handle a lot of the banking work and uses Evolve Bank (like basically every fintech company in America) and Goldman Sachs to actually do that work https://stripe.com/treasury. Not saying that itself doesn't take a long time to develop in terms of relationships, but its obviously much faster than actually going to FINRA and the US Comptroller and making a new bank.
Isn’t there actually just a tonne of complexity with handling payments once you leave the United States? In many countries there are preferred payment methods that aren’t just “enter card number, expiry, and cvv” and users are going to expect/hope to see their preferred method (and perhaps a way to get to it if the interface guesses incorrectly because eg they are on a vpn or an expat with banking relationships in their home country.) And then there are all sorts of ‘security’ things where the user must be redirected in many ways. Now multiply the complexity in payment options by the complexity in payment flows: maybe someone may get charged a variable amount up to some limit in the future (eg like a hotel or car rental) or maybe you want recurring payments (and the customer may be accustomed to using a different method for these) or maybe there is some other kind of flow I hadn’t thought of—businesses are quite diverse. And that ignores the complications of local laws and international money movement and foreign exchange and, of course, tax.
I think there are a few possible definitions for the word ‘boring’
1. Things you can’t talk about at an ordinary dinner party—math is boring
2. Things that are mundane or pedestrian—checkout at a supermarket is boring
3. Things that are simple but tedious—transferring your contacts from your Rolodex to your mobile telephone is boring
I think that because some definitions apply to stripe for the user or developer (definition 2, probably 1) it is easy to assume that definition 3 applies to the front end or the system as a whole. And surely it is a success of stripe to make their business look so trivial that people assume it is trivial. But I don’t really think that’s true.
Sibling comments are saying money, but that's not the whole reason imho. The mere act of putting out that kind of quality artifact into the world attracts the talent that can produce that kind of artifact (or in fact, even just talent that wants to learn/get to that level).
Obviously without the money incentive said virtuous circle could break down in an instant.
I thought this when i saw that giant draggable globe visualization on their homepage. Just thought of the sheer man-hours that must've gone into something so intricate and was so taken aback. They've got some really talented folks working over there.
If money could buy taste, a lot of the world would look better than it does. Culture isn’t a function of dollars, and we’re very lucky to have many people at Stripe who just really, really want to do great work.
(There is proof that significant financial resources aren't needed to do great work in a lot of personal websites. Most recent example I came across: https://bruno-simon.com.)
Money helps, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient.
I've been at a company that many considered to have excellent design and that received a lot of attention here (Heroku). There was a culture that permeated the company around beautiful design and what I would call "maker excellence". It was a place where people who liked building great things (both engineers and designers) felt at home.
Look at most of the biggest banks' website and their UI/UX is not even in the same league. I feel like stripe understood that their main clients are web geeks, so they are ready to pay the price and give the ressources needed for a good website.
I am often pulled towards this comment for an article that asks, "Are Designers Crazy?" [0]
"""
No, designers aren't crazy. You just don't understand a very fundamental concept of design. It even applies to engineering. It's okay—many people have the same frustrations as you do.
But those who care about the details achieve truly high quality results overall. It extends to all areas of the design, not just to the parts you can't see.
In the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," there's a scene in a dark room where Roger Rabbit (an animated character) flies across the room, knocks a hanging lamp around, and the lighting becomes so dynamic that all the shadows move around including the animated character's shadow. Here's the scene in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EUPwsD64GI
This was such a small detail that it would have been forgivable if the animators had left it out entirely: if they had not moved the lamp, kept the shadow steady, no one would have really noticed the difference. It would have been 100 times easier to animate and the effect wouldn't really have been that different.
But they did it anyway. The term was later coined, and "bump the lamp" is used throughout Disney (and probably other organizations) to mean something akin to "go the extra mile"—but I see it as having a special significance to design.
You're right, most people won't notice. By that logic, you could cut corners a lot of other places too. You could be lax about button colors matching exactly, or per-pixel sharpness on the map and buttons. No one would probably notice.
But if you go for every detail like it was the most important detail, you have the possibility of reaching a level of design quality that is superlative, and some people will notice. Others will not notice directly, but will see that the piece exudes style and quality subconsciously, due to the attention to small details. If you carry this into other areas of your work—programming, customer service, market strategy, marketing, and more—then you have a chance to create something of true quality.
If you don't pay attention to detail at that level, well, you might have the chance to actually get something done. Yes, it's a balance, like everything else. But you have to know that it won't be quite as good, and understand that yes, you are sacrificing something, even if you can't see it.
"""
In the same way, Stripe creates a superlative product and branding site, and in the mere act of doing so, it attracts those who also wish to create such products. It may seem high effort for those who may not seem to care, but for those who do, they immediately understand the value.
I beg to differ with an extreme contrarian view of design. I mostly belong in the International Style camp and I see everything through the lens of Uber-functionalism and judge that decoration is a crime. Stripe camps out on the decoration side of things.
I do find it sexy and bedazzling but that’s exactly why it is not interesting to me. Also Stripe’s taste is copied en-made to the point where it has become a self-propelling cliche in design. A good problem to have I suppose!
I don't think it is that great actually. For instance the pay button kind of glitters, when you hover over it. I mean, somebody put work into this effect, that isn't even physical but probably using a CSS curve for animation. It looks cheap. Speaking of UI, they could've e.g. made it easier for developers to test these prepared checkout forms with additional UI to fill out specific credit card numbers that you could enable in testing to make going through the cases easier? Or just do a panel in the developer dashboard to trigger the right events?
Also, the messages they send to the webhooks are not really that well documented. You never know 100% what actually happened. E.g. low funds isn't the same thing as a payment card limit, but Stripe send the same message for both. The second is usually easy for the user to fix, the first one can be tough one. You cannot help the user as you just have no idea what is happening - so you usually don't make the sale and who knows if the person will return. Testing things like subscription renewal is quite wasteful of developer time, you have to actually wait for stuff to happen and it can take an hour. Downloading receipts as PDF is done by parsing an HTML page - there really could've been an API endpoint for that. The Stripe CLI seems to only show so many items e.g. when creating products and prices. I haven't discovered an option to load more/ all/ a concrete number of these items. If it is present, it isn't easily discoverable when actually using the tool or reading the included help.
The documentation usually stops exactly at the point, where you would like to see a concrete implementation of things. Like what events do you actually need to handle and what do they mean exactly?
Oh and did I tell you about that time, when the support staff lied to our CEO about the support of USD accounts outside of the US/ Canada? No, it isn't possible to have funds transferred to a USD bank account created e.g. in Europe because you don't get a routing number there. The documentation on the website is correct, the support staff provided a false answer when asked absolutely specifically to clarify because it really isn't all that clear if you are setting things up.
All these things just make you angry, when you see the supposedly "polished" UI and then spend extra days or weeks handling situations that could've been handled from the get go by Stripe so no developer has to go through the pain. So the UI/ UX design and the overall style of communication seems to be quite shallow and disconnected from the real needs of customers be it developers or people buying stuff.
Don't get me wrong, Stripe is probably better than the average other financial institution and there are very hard-working people doing great engineering work at Stripe. It just all seems so 80% and that is much too short of the "really good" feel that would be actually polished.
Can't just be money. I was trying to find details on Pixel phone last night and saw Google's page for it, it was really bad. Stripe does pretty elaborate and new stuff (like those 3d books) and pulls it off flawlessly every single time.
"The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" by Hamming is like having the greatest doctoral advisor in your pocket. Any time I'm at a loss I open it up and find some sage wisdom to keep me going.
"Where is My Flying Car" is very good. The author is a bit overoptimistic IMO in his assessment of technological capabilities, but it has a great overview of attempted aviation innovations that I've never seen anywhere else.
There is a different book also called "The Big Score"[0] (not the one put out by Stripe Press), that is about a mining billionaire, Robert Friedland. He was Steve Jobs' roommate in college, it's alleged that some of Friedland's charisma rubbed off on Jobs. Interesting book for people who want to read about how startups work in the mining industry.
Highly recommend the books here, I only have a couple but they are what I want books to be: high quality content, in a high quality packaging. The paper is beautiful, the fonts lovely, the diagrams clean and informative. And the final cherry on top, they're not ugly if left out (so many books on business and engineering just look ugly!).
I bought The Dream Machine ended up looking for an electronic version because the type in the book was too small.
I highly recommend the book because it really is a beautiful object, but if your eyesight ain't what it used to be, read it on your Kindle. Either way, read it. I'm pretty sure if you like HN, you will enjoy the book.
Highly recommend The Dream Machine so far. I'm about half way through and it is a dense wealth of knowledge in early computing history. Incredibly well researched. The book has larger than average dimensions and smaller than average font size which means the 500ish pages is even more than one may expect. The way some topics are introduced is great too. There will be 6 pages leading up and talking about a machine, only to reveal that it was the PDP-1 (I got absolutely giddy when I read that part). Waldrop is a great writer.
I read "The Dream Machine" years ago after hearing Patrick recommend it in passing during an interview.
The book gave me a sense of purpose and belonging in the 'computer industry'. Software and the internet were already magical to me. After reading the Dream Machine, even more so.
Learning about computing pioneers' vision for what could be has kept me motivated to learn and one day contribute to humanity's greatest endeavor.
Is there a way to order these books without using amazon.com? Here in Canada I'm not seeing a clear path to purchase. I've got a few Stripe Press books (all well-loved gifts) so I assume they exist in Canadian channels.
The most impressive part is that it doesn't do this at the expense of compatibility. The page is reasonably navigable in a text-based browser like w3m.
It's perhaps not the easiest to navigate that way, but that's a complaint that could be levied in browsers with javascript and renderings as well.
My first thought on reading this was that it would be a product that would enable journalists to setup their own media agency really quickly, allowing a fuckton of more local, digital native media to replace the print media that was killed by Facebook/Social Media.
My strongest recommendation for Revolt of the Public as a text examining the effects of democratized media on the modern political process. The Stripe edition is beautifully-printed too.
This book review[0] by ACX/SSC might be more value for the time at this point, because first paragraph:
'The book is about how social-media-connected masses are revolting against elites, but the revolt has moved forward so quickly that a lot of what Gurri considers wild speculation is now obvious fact. I picked up the book on its "accurately predicted the present moment" cred, but it predicted the present moment so accurately that it's barely worth reading anymore. It might as well just say "open your eyes and look around".'
I think Scott was looking at it from a too US-centric perspective and part of what made the book interesting was drawing connections between movements around the world.
On top of that I would say he's also looking at it from a grey tribe[1] bubble. People in the red tribe and the blue tribe have analyzed the current situation from an ideological perspective and have missed the larger picture -- the analysis in this book is step 1 in disabusing people of the notion that this problem breaks down along purely political lines.
Not gonna lie, if it wasn’t for the comments, I wouldn’t of clicked this link (I’m glad I did though!). Honestly thought the “press” prefix to be corporate announcements.
Thank you so much for publishing/producing/making (?) 'We are as Gods' – I had of course read 'From Counter-Culture to Cyberculture' and 'What the Dormouse said' but not yet seen the movie.
Learning about Stewart Brand's history helped me better understand and appreciate my personal story and my relationship with systems. I have an original 1969 Whole Earth Catalog! It's one of my most treasured possessions :D
Can you point me to a stream / site to buy the film "we are as gods"? I don't see any button on the the stripe press page nor anywhere else on the net.
I've got a bit of a hack when it comes to sussing out which business books are the best. I look at the endorsement quotes and check if they are quotes from practitioners or quotes from other authors. 90%+ of the time they are from other authors and I know that likelihood of quality is low. On the other hand, quotes from practitioners (and especially ones successful in their field) are worth their weight in gold. Stripe Press books pass this test surprisingly often.
This is amazing! Thanks for sharing. Sidenote: the UI is lagging on my 2015 Macbook Pro. So much JS in there :( I could be wrong, but pretty sure all these animations could be done purely with HTML/CSS.
For folks who know any react I'd recommend react-three-fiber [1] as your entrypoint. It's ridiculously easy to get started. The creator (mlsarecmg on HN, I think), just came out with this tutorial today for beginners: https://twitter.com/0xca0a/status/1445409346305892353
It's paid but there's nearly endless free content as well between his twitter, the pmndrs discord, and the official docs [2].
I started using R3F and was able to put this [3] together, which is heavily inspired by Stripe design, in a couple weeks with some spare time. That is to say how easy it was and how highly I recommend the pmndrs suite for web 3D abstractions.
Hilarious that the purchase buttons link to Amazon rather than a Stripe checkout page. If they're publishing their own books, I wonder why they'd have to use Amazon instead.
The one I got has the print slowly falling off the cover, so maybe that's one of the things they try to save money on? Or maybe I was just unlucky, I'll still buy some of the other books they have put out.
A useful note, the content of these books tend to be very good, but also the quality of the physical product is top notch while not costing top notch money. I own 3 of their books (Prince of Persia, Elegant Puzzle, and Learning to Learn) and they all just feel good in the hand on top of having good insights.
They focus their issues on different engineering topics: May 2021 was "Containers," August 2020 was "APIs," Feb 2019 was "Internationalization," you get the idea. Can't recommend it enough. Worth scrolling through the topics to one that hits close to your interests.
Nearest to my own heart is the "Frontend" issue [2] -- every article is fucking fascinating, and one of my favorites is a deep dive from Evan You, the author of Vue, about the decision to do a full rewrite for Vue 3.
I am endlessly impressed by the quality of writing that comes out of Stripe.
[1] https://increment.com
[2] https://increment.com/frontend