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What Happens When You Tap a Card
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I’ve worked in payments for a long time, and card transactions still surprise smart people. A hold that won’t release. An amount that changes after you’ve paid. A refund that takes a week. So I’m going to write about them, in short posts. Each tries to say what to expect,…
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The Weight of the Prefix
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My LinkedIn headline currently reads: Technical Product Leader | Payments & Fintech | ex-Nium · ex-AmEx. I haven’t decided how long I’ll keep it that way. Some days it feels like useful context. Other days it feels like I’m leaning on something I should have moved past. I haven’t fully…
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The Lies Your Mind Tells You: 10 Thinking Traps That Quietly Steal Your Peace
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There’s a particular kind of suffering that has nothing to do with what’s actually happening to you, and everything to do with what you’re telling yourself about what’s happening. You miss one deadline at work, and within minutes you’re convinced you’re going to be fired, your career is over, and…
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When AI Starts Paying On Your Behalf
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Somewhere in the near future, and the leading edge of that future is already visible today, you will tell an AI to book you a flight, and the AI will book the flight. Not research flights and show you options. Not open a browser tab and wait for you to…
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The Infrastructure Shift Hiding in Plain Sight
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Start with a simple question. When a company in California pays a software vendor in Bangalore, what actually happens between the moment someone clicks send and the moment the vendor’s bank account shows a number? The answer, if you have spent any time in the payments industry, is that a…
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What Comparison Does To Us
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There is a particular quality of unhappiness that is generated not by anything that has actually happened to you but by looking at what is happening to someone else. It is a familiar feeling. You are doing reasonably well, by most available measures. And then you encounter evidence of someone…
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The Unpolished Ones
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There is something happening quietly on the internet right now, and it does not have a name yet, which is probably why it has not been ruined yet. It shows up in small moments. A person posts a painting they did over the weekend. The proportions are slightly off. The…
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Slow Reading In A Fast World
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There is a specific kind of pleasure that arrives about thirty pages into a book you have decided to take seriously. The initial friction is gone. The writer’s voice has become familiar. The particular logic of this particular work has started to settle into something you can inhabit rather than…