Increment
increment.com · Group blog · on HN since 2017
Increment is Stripe's magazine on how teams build and operate software systems at scale, with each issue on one theme.
What HN saysCommenters call it high-quality, on a different level from typical corporate engineering blogs, though they note it no longer publishes new posts.
192HN people shared it
36linked it in comments
248stories submitted
5.5Kstory points
4 months agolast shared
2017people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Increment – how teams build and operate software systems at scale14 people · 34 points · first shared 2017 · 3 comments on HN
- 2The future of work is written8 people · 12 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 3I test in prod7 people · 512 points · first shared 2019 · 156 comments on HN
- 4It’s COBOL all the way down7 people · 202 points · first shared 2018 · 189 comments on HN
- 5The Epistemology of Software Quality7 people · 39 points · first shared 2019 · 2 comments on HN
- 6In praise of property-based testing6 people · 147 points · first shared 2019 · 20 comments on HN
- 7In space, no one can hear you kernel panic6 people · 16 points · first shared 2020 · 2 comments on HN
- 8An IT migration corrupted 1.3B customer records5 people · 338 points · first shared 2019 · 187 comments on HN
- 9Increment Issue 2: Cloud5 people · 16 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 10What it’s like to be a developer at5 people · 10 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
- 11Why is CSS the way it is?4 people · 201 points · first shared 2020 · 163 comments on HN
- 12The melting pot of JavaScript (2017)4 people · 158 points · first shared 2017 · 194 comments on HN
- 13Exit the Haunted Forest4 people · 20 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
- 14Testing the Boundaries of Collaboration – Increment: Testing4 people · 10 points · first shared 2019 · 1 comments on HN
- 15Julia: The Goldilocks Language4 people · 7 points · first shared 2018 · 2 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
galoisscobi · 2022-11-21
https://ciechanow.ski is excellent, not really SWE focused content but it is a high quality technical blog.
https://increment.com doesn't have any new posts but I would still recommend it.
sadn1ck · 2022-01-01
I loved reading these https://increment.com/
also massive collection of blogs https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs
ketzo · 2021-10-05
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.
[1] https://increment.com
[2] https://increment.com/frontend
dmlittle · 2022-02-19
The design looks like a crossover between the Financial Times and Increment[0] (which is published by Stripe).
[0] https://increment.com/
yhoiseth · 2020-09-05
Not a book, but the current issue of https://increment.com/ is about APIs.
zoenolan · 2020-07-07
Newsletters
http://levelup.thekua.com/
https://softwareleadweekly.com/
http://www.techmanagerweekly.com/
https://wherewithall.com/
Blogs
https://randsinrepose.com/
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/
https://www.theengineeringmanager.com/
https://www.askamanager.org/
https://increment.com/
https://devtomanager.com/
Conference
https://theleaddeveloper.com/
Other Resources
http://lenareinhard.com/engineering-management-reads/
https://github.com/LappleApple/awesome-leading-and-managing
Previously: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712194
n_jd · 2020-05-13
From https://increment.com/on-call/when-the-pager-goes-off/ :
Slack uses its own product for all coordination during incidents and outages, so what happens when it goes down? “To the best of our ability, we use Slack,” says Richard Crowley, Director of Operations at Slack, “[but] If we’re really having a bad day, we use Skype.”
theaustinseven · 2020-04-03
I think so. Even if it's a little watered down at times, it's nice to have the strong focus on a given topic every time. It's also just nice to be able to go back to specific issues. I like to think of them as discussion starters: you can share them with your team, and do a little bit of a deeper dive into any of the given topics. It's really helpful to see some companies of various size's opinions/organization on specific issues(the architecture issue has a great example: https://increment.com/software-architecture/architecture-at-scale/).
It's also pretty spread out between issues(quarterly) so it's not very spammy.
mrala · 2020-01-13
You can see for yourself, the articles are free to read online: https://increment.com/
acemarke · 2020-01-09
Exactly. There's very good reasons why tools like Webpack and Babel exist.
Here's two excellent articles that go over the history and use cases behind the JS tooling ecosystem:
http://tinselcity.net/whys/packers
https://www.swyx.io/writing/jobs-of-js-build-tools
As a counter-point, there's also valid reasons why a lot of the JS tooling ecosystem is painful to work with:
https://increment.com/development/the-melting-pot-of-javascript/
https://www.swyx.io/writing/js-tooling/
For myself personally, I'm quite happy with the React ecosystem. For the kinds of "desktop-app-in-a-browser" apps I work on, it's fantastic.
(Caveat: I'm a Redux maintainer, so I'm also a bit biased here.)
crabasa · 2018-04-26
That was by far the weakest article.
My favorite was the Crash Course in Compilers:
https://increment.com/programming-languages/crash-course-in-compilers/
cocoflunchy · 2018-02-21
It's a publication by Stripe on engineering: https://increment.com/
sytse · 2017-04-13
Thanks Stripe for advancing the industry by generating this content. I'm impressed with how broad they interpret their mission of increasing the GDP of the internet. Their Atlas program is the best example.
BTW on https://stripe.com/about I only found "Help us build the universal payments infrastructure of the internet." but it is listed on https://stripe.com/press
Disclosure: I'm interviewed in one of the pieces https://increment.com/on-call/the-benefits-of-transparency/
huqedato · 2022-02-06
lioeters · 2021-08-31
aspenmayer · 2020-07-30
Two-thirds of projects on GitHub have 1-2 maintainers, as of 2015.[1][2] I’m sure many of those people are in other areas or occupations, or in other countries, where these high-paying jobs may not exist. Some people simply don’t wish to work at a company, and those folks still may produce value to those other than themselves.
Let’s not appeal to productivity too hard; learners and those of lesser coding capability also create value in the form of skills and knowledge.
It’s hard to identify and quantify those whose contributions helped most, but I feel all contributions are worthwhile. Not all code may be tip-worthy, but I don’t feel chagrin toward those collecting, however they do so.
> Only three projects—less than 3 percent of the study’s sample—had more than 50 contributors.[1]
[1] https://increment.com/open-source/the-rise-of-few-maintainer-projects/
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308894462
gynvael · 2025-12-03
Thanks!
Do you mean https://increment.com/programming-languages/? Huh, I never heard about it before - thanks for mentioning it! :)
sn9 · 2024-11-16
Stripe's Increment had an entire issue devoted to remote work: https://increment.com/remote/
jmillikin · 2022-09-18
I don't think that's true -- a "full" rewrite is used in contrast to a "partial" rewrite, where only part of the system is replaced. It's called a "full" rewrite because the goal from the start is to fully replace the system with new code.
Consider that if this were not true, then there would be no way to describe an incremental full rewrite, nor any way to describe a from-scratch replacement of a subsystem.
I've written on this topic before, for example https://increment.com/software-architecture/exit-the-haunted-forest/
dsego · 2022-03-25
Actually, I do have some links that I'd pocketed (and forgotten about):
Old CSS, new CSS / fuzzy notepad (this one was featured on HN several times)
https://eev.ee/blog/2020/02/01/old-css-new-css/?utm_source=pocket_myli…
Ask an expert: Why is CSS . . . the way it is?
https://increment.com/frontend/ask-an-expert-why-is-css-the-way-it-is/
CSS Thesis by Håkon Wium Lie
https://www.wiumlie.no/2006/phd/css.pdf
avivo · 2020-09-08
I think this in point. "[Treat] the attacker user personas with the same primacy as those of the customer user personas — [put] them on a wall in the office and [have] everyone conversant in their "needs".
Another solid piece that goes into more of the details of threat modeling: https://increment.com/security/approachable-threat-modeling/
banq · 2020-03-09
functional architecture is the future: https://increment.com/software-architecture/primer-on-functional-archi…
danhite · 2020-02-25
The project you remembered but couldn't locate is likely Prune within Limbo in the TCR (test && commit || revert) experimental development style by Kent Beck et al which you can review here:
https://increment.com/testing/testing-the-boundaries-of-collaboration/
tomlockwood · 2019-07-16
> Some banks have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and several years migrating systems.
The commonwealth bank in Australia, one of the biggest four banks in the country, spent AUD$1B migrating away from COBOL.
https://increment.com/programming-languages/cobol-all-the-way-down/
shay_ker · 2018-11-24
This part is really eye-opening on getting an organization to open source their code:
https://increment.com/security/open-sourcing-buzzfeeds-single-sign-on-…
There's understandably a lot of pressure in open sourcing anything security related. I wonder if that's because this SSO project belongs to Buzzfeed, and not a company that specializes in API gateways, like Kong:
https://github.com/ohioit/kong-oauth-sso
So many devs end up implementing oauth & sso through an API gateway when they move to microservices (we did). I'm just surprised that those features don't exist in popular gateways like nginx & haproxy in the non-enterprise versions. It seems sorely needed!
berbec · 2018-05-29
Cobol is the new Cobol
https://increment.com/programming-languages/cobol-all-the-way-down/
reaperducer · 2018-05-27
From April 2018:
Companies involved in keeping COBOL-based systems working say that 95 percent of ATM transactions pass through COBOL programs, 80 percent of in-person transactions rely on them, and over 40 percent of banks still use COBOL as the foundation of their systems. “Our COBOL business is bigger than it has ever been,” said Chris Livesey, senior vice president and general manager at Micro Focus, a company that offers modern COBOL coding and development frameworks.
Source: https://increment.com/programming-languages/cobol-all-the-way-down/
goatlover · 2018-04-26
And Just came across link to new Julia article thanks to HN: https://increment.com/programming-languages/goldilocks-language-histor…
alexashka · 2018-04-26
Right, let me give you a comparison of the approach this magazine has taken, and another place I consider pretty good: Wikipedia.
https://increment.com/programming-languages/language-history/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages
What does the magazine article do better than that Wikipedia article? Wikipedia has hyperlinks - the thing that differentiates paper magazines, from the internet. The article doesn't.
The wikipedia article is more thorough, you can actually go and explore.
I just don't understand the authors or the publishers - they seem to be re-inventing the wheel that Wikipedia in the case of programming languages, has solved by spending much more time, care and expertise on it.
This is a fundamental problem with the internet - it's filled with people re-inventing things that need not be re-invented. Maybe I'm just a grump, I'm sorry.
icebraining · 2017-04-15
https://increment.com/feed.xml
(for most readers, putting just the domain should auto-detect)