TIL: 28th July 2023 — FinOps woes and the art of fucking off

Stripe can't amend invoices that were "paid" for§

Once a Stripe invoice ends up in a paid state nothing can be done with it, even through the support superpowers. Even if the invoice has a null price. This is both good and bad.

Good because this leaves immutable financial history and support channels can't be leveraged for potential fraud.

It's bad if your processes depend on a third party that takes data from Stripe, but has unexpected limitations that break said processes.

Which brings us to...

Maxio thinks line item quantities can't be larger than 2,147,483,647§

Maxio, a FinOps platform, apparently believes that no product can be sold in quantities that exceed a 32-bit signed integer.

Integer being signed is curious on its own — do they, at the same time, anticipate people selling negative values of some products?

If your product is e.g. network traffic which you're accounting for in bytes for accuracy, then the invoices that Maxio is pulling from Stripe will catch you by surprise. By the merit of entirely failing the synchronisation process forever without any means of mitigation.

taking a step back§

I've got a great advice on one of the product talks about building productive teams organised by Kolo (stream available in Ukrainian below) — learn to fuck off from yourself.

At some point you need to stop being the problem solver in your team if you are one, it only leads to burnout. Instead progressively build the confidence inside your team to the point where you can take a step back and leave the stage for your people to flourish and bring their ambitions to life.

Your job is to build such a team — take your humility, empathy and dive into the people problems instead of having an answer for every product problem. Perhaps this could lead to a happier and healthier life along with a better product.