
Introducing Increment - sinak
https://stripe.com/blog/increment
======
jacquesm
Feedback in case anybody from stripe is tuned in: I'd love to read these
stories but not 6 around the same theme all at once. Like that it will take
years (at your rate of publication, 4 times per year) to cover even the basics
of running a complete operation. Please consider mixing different aspects for
a single issue, both in the name of variety and to cover some ground in a
reasonable time.

Other than that: thanks for publishing this, I've often wondered why there
isn't a central repository (like a wiki or something like that) with the
various recipes you can use to tackle a given problem and what works and what
doesn't in practice.

~~~
shawn-furyan
I'm willing to ride with this format. Magazines tend to be disposable except
for when they have a particularly impactful in-depth piece or themed issue.
This format is all themed issues with in-depth pieces. It also allows Stripe
to focus resources more effectively on the supposed goal of delivering
evergreen authoritative recommendations. This is something that is sorely
lacking in the current environment where anything over 6-months old is often
unusable.

The internet currently provides more breadth in the area than a single person
could possibly need. I laud the focus on depth.

~~~
MacsHeadroom
This format sounds like HBR for software professionals. Sounds great to me.

------
timdorr
> Susan Fowler joined Stripe to found and edit Increment and the first issue
> launches today.

BTW, this is the same Susan Fowler of ex-Uber fame:
[https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-
on...](https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-
strange-year-at-uber) Congrats on the new position, Susan!

I'd be interested in hearing what it's like moving from a code-focused job to
a content-focused job. Seems like a very unique shift!

~~~
jacquesm
That would be nice, as well as a 'one year in' perspective on the cultural
differences between those two companies. Getting the company culture right is
a lot harder than getting the tech right.

~~~
bartkappenburg
She joined stripe in Jan 2017 and left uber in dec 2016.

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, so that would have to wait for a bit. Still, it would make for very
interesting reading.

------
drinchev
Side-topic alert.

Stripe is my top design company these days. Just looking at their landing
pages [1], [2], I'm deeply impressed by their effort on making the web
beautiful.

Huge inspiration for me. Kudos to their front-end / design teams.

1: [https://stripe.com/atlas](https://stripe.com/atlas) 2:
[https://stripe.com/connect](https://stripe.com/connect)

~~~
OJFord
Except I can't read this blog post on my Nexus 7, Android, Chrome. (Both sides
are cut off.)

~~~
devopsproject
You pesky android users are always complaining about my beautifully designed
pages. They look great on my iPad. There must be something wrong with your
droid /s

~~~
memco
Not to rain on your parade, but it also cuts off on the right side when
shifting from portrait to landscape on iPhone SE.

------
sytse
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](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](https://stripe.com/press)

Disclosure: I'm interviewed in one of the pieces [https://increment.com/on-
call/the-benefits-of-transparency/](https://increment.com/on-call/the-
benefits-of-transparency/)

~~~
ryandrake
Off-topic, but that about page is pretty awesome. Is that everyone who works
at Stripe? If so--kudos, what a nice touch. Most start-up "About Us" pages
just show smiling head shots and bios of the founder and senior execs, as if
they're the only people doing anything in the company.

~~~
fizx
It's more that if you put all of your employees up there, they start getting
poached.

It says a lot about Stripe's workplace culture that they're not afraid of
this.

~~~
ryandrake
> It's more that if you put all of your employees up there, they start getting
> poached.

I hope you're joking, because that seems like a very silly reason in the age
of LinkedIn and recruiter databases. It's probably very easy to find a
relatively up-to-date list of employees for any given company out there.

My guess is that most small companies don't do this simply because they don't
even consider that it would be a nice gesture to publicly recognize more than
just the top execs.

~~~
tensor
Speaking from experience, it's actually worries about poaching, letting the
competition know the size of your various teams, and possibly privacy for
employees too.

You are right that with things like LinkedIn you could probably get a lot of
this information, but it's enough of a hurdle that execs still think it's
worth it.

~~~
shawn-furyan
Well, then this is superstition on the part of those execs. LinkedIn is the
one tool that every recruiter uses. They are more likely to map out your
employee network on LinkedIn than to even visit your company website at all
(much less count on it for having accurate up-to-date information).

------
nrook
I was surprised to see no discussion of an oncall bonus or compensation in the
first issue of Increment. This is a practice which is uncommon but not rare in
the industry; Google, for instance, offers generous compensation to developers
with a serious oncall shift.

It would be interesting to see a discussion of this topic, but I suppose this
is expected if a publication is published by a company rather than by laborers
directly.

~~~
teach
Could you go into more detail? It seems like the goal of the magazine is
"practical and useful insight into what effective teams are doing."

Is there any evidence that on-call bonuses or compensation affects the quality
of work that a team does? Maybe there is, but most of the research I've seen
doesn't support that conclusion.

~~~
tensor
I think employee retention would be a much bigger concern. On-call work is
very disruptive and I suspect many developers would be quite unhappy to be
asked to do that without some form of compensation. Compensation seems like an
extremely important topic when trying to put together an on-call program.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Coversely, you can't dump all of the on call work onto your Ops/DevOps team
unless you're compensating them appropriately (or the team is large enough
that on call rotations are infrequent). Otherwise, say goodbye to retention.

------
siliconc0w
Great work - love reading this stuff.

As a sort of mini-rant - with so much 'incident transparency' with Slack,
Email, Dashboards, Hangouts, etc high-sev issues can devolve into all hands
events if you haven't nailed the culture as well. These can be intensely
political - where you got random managers/execs who haven't touched code in
years in the Slack channel trying to look engaged and competent offering
suggestions like, "Have we tried rolling back the release?" and the smart
engineers who could actually fix the problem are afraid to do anything because
everything they do is broadcasted to the entire company. It's relatively easy
to adopt the tools and processes of successful tech companies but it's hard to
get the culture.

~~~
tedmiston
After a few years of experience, I'm convinced that "getting the culture
right" and later "not fucking up the culture" are the hardest parts.

------
criddell
I thought this might be _the_ micropayment service that I've been waiting for.
Turns out, it's a newsletter.

~~~
TuringNYC
I was hoping it was some declining balance product as well!

------
necubi
Any chance of getting this in kindle/e-reader compatible format? The website
is beautiful, but reading long-form content is so much nicer on e-ink.

~~~
solatic
Yeah, there needs to be at least an RSS feed. An email subscription is just
going to get lost in my inbox and otherwise I'm never going to see when new
issues come out. Once there's an RSS feed, there are a variety of services
which will read the feed and send it to a Kindle.

~~~
icebraining
[https://increment.com/feed.xml](https://increment.com/feed.xml)

(for most readers, putting just the domain should auto-detect)

------
_hamilton
I need a physical copy of this 'magazine' so I can read it on the pooper. :)
Thanks Stripe.

------
Zaheer
Impressed by Stripe's marketing strategy. With the acquisition of
IndieHackers.com and now this, they're taking content marketing to the next
level.

------
aero142
One of the things that stuck me when reading Susan Fowler's Uber article, was
just how well written it was. It gives me a lot of hope for this magazine.

------
iamleppert
Not sure what to make of this, given the redundant, monochromatic content
about being on-call. It doesn't appeal to me. A magazine format is not
appropriate for such a narrow focus. You're not going to gain the continuing
readership without a sufficiently broad appeal.

Also, the introduction of putting down the rest of the industry while
simultaneously extolling your own ideas is very off-putting, especially if we
haven't heard them yet. The strength of the Stripe brand matters not; I do not
know who you are.

That said, Stripe is a great company and I'd love to hear more about how they
are doing things. But please, if you want me to pay attention to you, sans the
hubris self-congratulatory tone.

------
VikingCoder
There are multiple ways to successfully organize teams of software developers.

What matters most is that the choices are consistent and coherent.

It's nice to read about practices that work in one environment, but you have
to keep in mind how they integrate in to the big picture of all of the
choices.

For instance, some teams branch everywhere, for everything. Which is fine, and
some people do it to great success.

Some teams develop at head, for everything. Which is fine, and some people do
it to great success.

But the tools you need to build around those two approaches are totally
different. Reading about the tools and techniques, without understanding how
they all fit together, and trying to adopt them because they work for other
people, could be a recipe for disaster.

------
xbeta
Interesting, Will Larson [1] was also a manager at Uber, probably worked with
Susan in the past.

[1] : [https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-
larson-a44b543/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-larson-a44b543/)

------
reledi
Any plans to have a physical copy with subscription?

~~~
flavor8
Or a PDF.

------
danellis
Why package articles up into a quarterly "magazine"? That doesn't make much
sense on the Web. Why not publish the articles in a blog?

------
noir_lord
I like that the "Ask an Expert" about on-call emergencies section has an
answer from Phil Calçado (Director of Product Engineering at DigitalOcean)

Made me chuckle.

[1] [https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/update-on-the-
apri...](https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/update-on-the-apri..). (for
anyone who missed them nuking the production db).

~~~
jacquesm
Every company I've _ever_ seen, including the best ones has made at least one
mistake of that calibre (or much, much worse) in their history. In most cases
you never heard about it because it happened early enough that hardly anybody
noticed. The only reason you know about this one is because DO is large enough
to be newsworthy, or you might even be a customer of theirs.

The hard part of running a start-up is to _get_ to that point where if you
fuck up enough people will notice that it makes the press.

~~~
noir_lord
No criticism of DO was implied and I agree every company has such issues (I
locked myself out of most of the servers the other day because I deleted
id_rsa instead of id_dsa and then had to walk home to get my back up drive).

It was just amusing _timing_.

~~~
jacquesm
> No criticism of DO was implied and I agree every company has such issues (I
> locked myself out of most of the servers the other day because I deleted
> id_rsa instead of id_dsa and then had to walk home to get my back up drive).

Oops :)

> It was just amusing timing.

Ah ok. Your link doesn't work btw.

------
sebringj
Netflix never pre-announced their series of extremely useful videos because
they were just useful and people watched them in droves often being top
results on Hacker News. Youtube + articles are nice for that sort of thing and
I don't see a reason to deviate from that if the content is actually worth
viewing.

------
mempko
Some of the best content of this type I've seen is from the ACM. If you are
not a member I really encourage you to join.

~~~
switch007
Which part of the ACM? They have like 10 magazines, 50 journals...and much,
much more.

~~~
dominotw
[http://queue.acm.org/](http://queue.acm.org/)

------
dhruvp
I love how Stripe does so many things that provide value to the developer
community from their awesome blog posts to their open source retreats and now
finally to this magazine. They're a model to me of how to earn the good will
of your users through providing authentic value.

------
arkaniad
This seems like a cool idea. I do wish there was an RSS feed available for me
to add to my feed reader, though.

~~~
edwinwee
There is! [https://increment.com/feed.xml](https://increment.com/feed.xml)

------
19eightyfour
I love how Stripe is transitioning into a services company for internet
companies, particularly startups.

------
blizkreeg
Unrelated q: is increment.com an off-the-shelf magazine theme or custom
development?

~~~
pc86
I would be shocked if something from Stripe was using an OTS theme.

~~~
polutropos
The styles and animations are quite similar to the Stripe dashboard, so I
would assume it's all internal styling.

------
randomerr
It seems like a different view on Agile.

------
elastic_church
Nice, I'd been wishing for a "devops" book full of case studies - what
situations teams were in and how they handled it. Occasionally you get an
engineering blog post, but most of those are just boasting unilaterally about
a solution, and not any critical discussion of the problem or the myriad of
bandaids most of us have to deal with.

This might be a step in the right direction.

~~~
sciurus
You may like Build Quality In.

"The interdependent disciplines of Continuous Delivery and DevOps are of
immense value to an organisation, but they are hard. We have seen Continuous
Delivery and DevOps work in the wild, as have other practitioners. We want to
help people on their own Continuous Delivery and DevOps journey, by sharing
the experiences of those who have done it – what worked, what didn’t, and the
highs and lows of trying to build quality into an organisation."

[https://leanpub.com/buildqualityin](https://leanpub.com/buildqualityin)

------
LoSboccacc
rip high scalability blog

------
dominotw
what an unfortunate name. sounds like excrement.

~~~
bitdiddle
my thought exactly, memo to marketing :)

------
mattste
This is awesome. Is there an email form where I can sign-up to get an alert
when a new issue is released?

~~~
dorian-graph
On the bottom of the Increment homepage.

------
snackai
Would really prefer Stripe to release more payment options like Bitcoin or
Paypal, or adding more countries and their more local payment options.

~~~
jmtulloss
Bitcoin is supported!
[https://stripe.com/docs/bitcoin](https://stripe.com/docs/bitcoin)

We are also expanding our coverage, you can sign up to get notified when we
open up access to different methods here:
[https://stripe.com/payments](https://stripe.com/payments).

~~~
snackai
I'm really sorry for my comment. Turns out I didn't check Stripe for a while.
Bitcoin is now completely supported yes, and I see support for SEPA and other
payment options incoming. Great guys!

~~~
jmtulloss
No need to apologize, it's not that obvious from the marketing materials.

------
edoceo
Will Stripe discuss their choice to selectively enforce their own TOS? I'm
sure many start-up business would like to know how to pick and choose when
they enforce their own TOS

