Plaid Blog
blog.plaid.com · Company blog · on HN since 2016
Plaid's company blog covers its financial data API, bank integrations, international launches, the Visa deal and engineering practices.
What HN saysHN commenters cite it for company announcements, such as the Visa deal and Canada launch, and for its inclusive code review article.
30HN people shared it
11linked it in comments
44stories submitted
1.8Kstory points
6 years agolast shared
2016people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Building an Inclusive Code Review Culture3 people · 164 points · first shared 2018 · 75 comments on HN
- 2Plaid Launches in the UK2 people · 163 points · first shared 2019 · 75 comments on HN
- 3Plaid in Canada2 people · 126 points · first shared 2018 · 57 comments on HN
- 4Plaid Is Joining Visa2 people · 13 points · first shared 2020 · 3 comments on HN
- 5Seeking refuge from unsafe JavaScript2 people · 13 points · first shared 2016 · 1 comments on HN
- 6Microsoft announces Money in Excel powered by Plaid2 people · 8 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
- 7Plaid launches integrations with 60+ new banks2 people · 6 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 8Plaid's Fintech Request for Startups (part 2)2 people · 5 points · first shared 2018 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Transaction Dupes – Debugging multiple race conditions2 people · 5 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 10We 30x'd our Node parallelism1 people · 202 points · first shared 2019 · 243 comments on HN
- 11How Plaid Reconciles Pending and Posted Transactions1 people · 127 points · first shared 2019 · 26 comments on HN
- 12Plaid Launches in France, Spain, and Ireland1 people · 122 points · first shared 2019 · 60 comments on HN
- 13Monitoring 9600 banks at scale1 people · 96 points · first shared 2018 · 13 comments on HN
- 14Growing Our Team with Retrospectives1 people · 86 points · first shared 2019 · 22 comments on HN
- 15How we reduced deployment times by 95%1 people · 84 points · first shared 2019 · 57 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
laliberte · 2019-03-02
I work at a company that is one of Plaid's largest customers and have chatted with their engineers before at a meetup in San Francisco. They were very open that they store the data themselves, and even shared this blog post with me about how they poll for data: https://blog.plaid.com/distributed-duplicate-detective/.
For what it's worth, I actually like Plaid's API compared to Yodlee, but have serious concerns about privacy. There's no way to determine if they are _just_ collecting transactions when you request the user's transactions as a dev. The user is handing over their user/pass/MFA and Plaid could be doing god knows what with that.
CognitiveLens · 2018-10-24
Here are a couple great articles about code review that I've learned a lot from - they address the 'social' aspect of code review specifically, which I think is where you're having a hard time finding traction.
- https://blog.plaid.com/building-an-inclusive-code-review-culture/
- https://medium.freecodecamp.org/unlearning-toxic-behaviors-in-a-code-r…
The takeaway is that it's a communication problem, and one of the first steps is probably setting some shared expectations. As others have mentioned, if you can't get alignment on expectations, you're not going to be happy in your job, but hopefully there's common ground somewhere, and you can all help each other level up technically and as a team.
wyattjoh · 2018-07-12
Would really love to see Privacy.com come to Canada now that Plaid announced support[0]!
[0]: https://blog.plaid.com/plaid-in-canada/
vichu · 2020-01-13
Looks like it's official: https://blog.plaid.com/plaid-and-visa/
legohorizons · 2019-10-29
Isn't this the space that Plaid is taking the lead in? What other opportunities are there in the banking API system aside from what Plaid is doing/won't do in the near future?
Plaid used to publish https://blog.plaid.com/rfs/ but they stopped this year.
kryptographs · 2019-08-30
Hi there! Keith here from Plaid. We launched in the UK back in May this year - check out our blog post here https://blog.plaid.com/plaid-in-the-uk/ and feel free to shoot us an email at [email protected] if we can be of any help getting you set up!
ChrisSD · 2019-05-29
https://blog.plaid.com/aisp/
They are PSD2 compliant which means they're using the Open Banking API I linked to in my other comment.
hyperpape · 2018-08-15
There's a really good code review guide on the plaid blog that addressed this: https://blog.plaid.com/building-an-inclusive-code-review-culture/.
Money quote: "Nothing should be surprising to a reviewer in a code review: discuss any significant design decisions before code is written. Code reviews are a time to iron out implementation details, not discuss major design or architecture decisions."
whockey · 2016-06-20
They're an awesome client of ours! We also partnered with them on their ACH product[1].
[1] - https://blog.plaid.com/plaid-and-stripe/
bjacokes · 2019-12-13
While we were worried about event loop blockages causing outages, another more subtle problem would have been if event loop blockages doubled our user-facing latency. (If you read the section on latency ratios, you'll see that comparing parallel vs non-parallel workers was the most useful stat in figuring out how effectively we were using the event loop.) It definitely gave us peace-of-mind to know that event loop blockages wouldn't have an effect beyond the requests they're processing.
Honestly, the accounting for which would've been higher impact – investing in parallelism earlier, or adding infrastructure and having more resources to devote to other pressing needs – is difficult to do, even in retrospect. There was surprisingly little effort required to get to 4,000 node containers in an ECS cluster, other than deploy speed issues which we talked about in a previous post [1]. But it's possible this migration process would have been easier if we had done it sooner.
[1] https://blog.plaid.com/how-we-reduced-deployment-times-by-95/
bubblethink · 2017-06-14
web authentication is really not my area, but would you care to explain how this is safe ? For instance, I recognize when an app or a site is trying to use google to authenticate me, I am taken to google to authenticate. I'm not taken to the bank in this case. From https://blog.plaid.com/getting-started/, it looks like a curl request with plaintext password request made to plaid's servers.
Also from https://plaid.com/legal/longtail/, "You acknowledge that in accessing your data and information through the Service, your provider account access number(s), password(s), security question(s) and answer(s), account number(s), login information, and any other security or access information, and the actual data in your account(s) with such provider(s) such as bank and other account balances, credit card charges, debits and deposits (collectively, "Provider Account Data"), may be collected and stored in the Service."