Joel Taylor

Billing and payments @ GitHub.

Co-organizer for @BigTransaction

I like building payment systems.

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

@tobthecreator @BarracudaIO I really appreciate that, thank you for the kind words! I'm hoping to get back in the groove one of these days.

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

@byAnhtho @GetLago @tom_nguy @Christophepas Few immediate resources come to mind:

- Pretty much anything by @jstanier
who authored "Effective Remote Work"
- There's a lot of gold in https://t.co/69kDyImCM3
- Resource for inspiration https://t.co/m2jNRRKQah

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

My new trick when I'm having trouble sleeping is to start that one Google Doc I've been procrastinating. Wide awake to droopy eyed in a 💥

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

I think I'd rather go to the dentist than facilitate Zoom meetings where everyone is silent.

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

@olivierlacan @mattstaff Had the exact same question and that's a great call out.
The more I thought about it I realized it also makes sense from the speed perspective. In my 1970s home, the drywall was both glued and nailed to studs and demoing sections "cleanly" is super time consuming.

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

This book is so good and jam packed with actionable knowledge that I have to go back to take notes on my notes.

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

Some days my job as a software engineer consists of staring at graphs and tweaking code to make lines move up and down on those graphs.

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

Commenting loses all of its value the instant the comment blocks exceed the length of a Google doc. Or maybe I just don't like mazes?

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

Wearing actual pants instead of pajama pants during remote work does more for my productivity than all my TODO and knowledge management workflows combined.

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

@japborst Great question – utilization can exceed 100% if the arrival rate exceeds the service rate causing the queue to grow infinitely. This chart is a Kafka consumer (should've mentioned that), which is unlike an app server that would likely start rejecting requests as it grows unstable

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

There's a general rule that M/M/c queues approach instability around 75% utilization. It's interesting to see that in practice – in the image below the queue clearly grows as it crosses 60% into higher territory.

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

My latest love language is chatting about anything related to M/M/c queues.

What are those? I'm glad you asked because there's a fantastic e-book (free) from VividCortex that's 🫶

https://t.co/CpADZHbzBG

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

It turns out that I can put together a presentation with one week notice, but my brain won’t like it and it’ll lack typography, fun graphics and possibly coherent thought.

But hey, did that.

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

First real life talk in years. It’s like Zoom, but different?

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

@StripeDev @cjav_dev This series is absolutely incredible @cjav_dev!

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

Excited to attend and host a workshop at my first fintech_devcon!

[fintech_devcon @fintechdevcon]

👉 Proof our #fintechdevcon agenda is ✅: @joeltaylor from @github will share all that goes into launching a production-ready #payments system. Hands-on exercises will teach you core concepts, common blindspots, and best practices you can apply to your applications. 💪

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

@byAnhtho Agreed! I love the call out around annual and overage opportunities to capture revenue expansion. It's an exciting recipe🥘!

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

I find it interesting that these challenges are universal to billing in arrears. However, the pricing model, whether it be usage based, marketplace, etc., drastically changes the story around how to solve for them.

[Lago @GetLago]

Usage based pricing

🔴 Collecting cash after the service is consumed can be challenging (if you already disputed an invoice that skyrocketed, you know about it!)
🔴 No visibility on revenues, no recurring cash inflows isn’t good
🔴 The end-customer wants visibility on costs

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

For example, consider end-customer cost visibility:

Uber – calculates price up front

TaskRabbit – has fixed pricing on select tasks, but difficult to estimate "closet organization"

Cloud service – forecast calculators or other predictive models

[Joel Taylor @joeltaylor]

@kiwicopple @byAnhtho @swyx @amberfloio @getmetronome @GetLago @supabase We also have spend-caps at GitHub for meter based products and it's a heavily used feature. It certainly introduces interesting product and engineering challenges, but erring in the customer's favor tends to ease some of the complexity.

https://t.co/9kbADf0GWf