David Singleton
@dps
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CEO at /dev/agents formerly CTO @stripe. 🏡 in SF via London and Belfast, married to @fjsingleton. I like to make things.
San Francisco, CA
Joined March 2007
🚀 Excited to announce my new company: /dev/agents. I’m building the next-gen operating system for AI agents, joining my former colleagues @hbarra, @alcor, and @ficus as co-founders. We're excited to partner with @ninaachadjian (Index Ventures) and @jillchase124 (CapitalG).
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At Stripe we care about being meticulous in our craft. Sometimes that means putting effort into getting the small things right. Little details compound into end to end experiences that are surprisingly great. We shipped 100s of tiny tweaks last year. Some of my favorites 🧵.
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Last week I spent a couple of days writing code @stripe. We think about and invest a lot in our internal developer experience. Having spent >10 yrs at Google I like to think I have a high bar. But last week's experience was substantially better than anything I've seen at scale.
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We just shared our annual letter, including how we engineer for reliability as we deploy new code in our core API services ~400 times daily at trillion dollar scale. Once a change is code-complete, it's evaluated by ~1.4 million tests.
Stripe’s 2023 annual letter is here! Lots of detail on what we’re seeing across the internet economy, including a robust startup ecosystem despite the VC pullback.
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In Lagos where I met @shollsman, @0x, and the team from @paystack. We spoke about the opportunity to increase the GDP of the internet in Nigeria—and across Africa—and ways that engineering team at Stripe can help support this mission.
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I built a fun toy / proof of concept this afternoon. It's a probabilistic spreadsheet. Ever since a university lecturer taught us to build spreadsheet models and play around with inputs and understand how sensitive the output was to that variable, I wished this was built in.
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Yesterday my daughter (nearly 4) went on the #WomensMarchSF. Tonight: "It's time to get out of the bath!" "No Daddy, it's not your choice, no man can tell me what to do! On the march they told me 'your body, your choice'." #daddysbeenowned.
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Businesses on Stripe have asked how we handle Black Friday–Cyber Monday. So, we built a live dashboard to show exactly how. For the very first time, you can see request load, API uptime, and live transaction data across the entire Stripe network:
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We just sent out our annual user letter. One in ten people in the world transacted with a business powered by @stripe in 2022! Some of my favorite parts are about our foundations:. 1/ Stripe's software is now > 50 million lines of code.
Our Stripe 2022 annual letter:
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Stripe Bucharest is now open! 🇷🇴. I'm inspired by all the intrepid entrepreneurs and talented engineers and PMs we met this week. We're continuing to invest in Central and Eastern Europe and support the many businesses that use Stripe here (and thank you for the IRL feedback!).
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Black Friday/Cyber Monday [BFCM] is a big deal for our users. So it’s a big deal for @stripe too. We handled billions of $s in sales each day of BFCM. A 5 minute downtime = tens of millions in lost revenue for our users. Here's how we achieved >99.9999% uptime. 👇.
Congratulations to the Stripe infrastructure teams! With record scale, Black Friday and Cyber Monday passed uneventfully. >20,000 peak RPS and >99.9999% API success rate.
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Stripe is opening an office in Bucharest, Romania and we're hiring engineers!. If you're interested, apply now:
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Over the holiday break, I decided to learn @rustlang by writing a ray tracer based on @Peter_shirley 's excellent guide. It was a real joy to fiddle around with my own software to paint pretty pictures of a virtual world while exploring a new way of thinking about code.
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🥇We updated our algorithm that ranks payment methods for each checkout session based on their popularity. This means that customers can more easily use the most popular payment methods in their country at checkout. As a result, many merchants saw a material increase in revenue.
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The team at Stripe gave me a sneak peek at this. Nobody told me it was real. I thought it was a pretty slick render. Then someone walked into frame to mess with the cables or something and I was 🤯. "Holee sh–. It exists!". Bravo on once again outdoing yourselves, Stripes! Also.
We built a machine to track Black Friday/Cyber Monday on Stripe. Explore real-time data all weekend:
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⚠️ We made it faster for merchants and our support teams to get context on API errors. This helps a great deal for support teams to track down exactly which API request users are referring to. Now, the request_log_url token links to the exact API request log that failed.
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Stripe users just crossed $10.5B in BFCM sales across 135M transactions. On to Cyber Monday we go.
Businesses on Stripe have asked how we handle Black Friday–Cyber Monday. So, we built a live dashboard to show exactly how. For the very first time, you can see request load, API uptime, and live transaction data across the entire Stripe network:
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Left: US letter rendering on A4 paper. Right: A4 rendering on A4 paper, with the correct margins and spacing. Localization is more than just translation. Small details add up to the big picture. 📄
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Delightful dev experiences at Stripe start with reducing friction in our internal tools. When it came time to migrate our largest JavaScript codebase to TypeScript, our Developer Productivity team thought “What if we just do it over the weekend?”
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I am sitting right now on a Boeing 747. It remains one of the biggest and fastest passenger aircraft in service. The 747 first flew in 1969. The same year we landed on the moon. The 747 was designed and built in 28 months.
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Thrilled about usage-based billing with our new Meters API. You can now ingest, aggregate, and view usage events on Stripe in real time. Get started with usage-based billing, and all the other product updates announced at Stripe Sessions 2024:
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Watch @demishassabis and @matthewclifford discuss how AI can accelerate scientific discovery and how multimodality puts us on the path to human-level AI. Demis and Matt—thank you for your insights.
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🇯🇵 All Japanese merchants on Stripe can now download invoices in A4 paper size. The standard paper size in Japan is A4, so printing invoices was tricky for our Japanese users. So we updated our PDF generation logic from US letter to A4.
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.@stripe we fully offset our greenhouse gas emissions. Starting this year, we are also committing to pay for the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Carbon capture and sequestration tech is nascent today, we hope our commitment helps drive commercialization.
Stripe's negative emissions commitment:
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Using our internal LLM tool has been really valuable. My favorite feature is preset prompts—which can be lovingly refined by one person—and then shared with everyone else. Popular examples: style guides, SQL query helper, and an ELI5 teacher (pictured).
We built an internal LLM tool (with prompt sharing/discovery, careful privacy controls, configurable models, etc.). Been working on it for a few months, and ~1/3 of people at Stripe are now using it every week. Cool to see how diverse the use-cases are.
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As a company of developers, building for developers, we care *a lot* about developer tools. So we built Workbench—a first-of-its-kind dev tool that lets you look under the hood to understand, debug, and grow your Stripe integration.
Introducing Stripe Workbench. 🧰. Build faster than ever with our new developer tool. Join the beta:
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I showed GPT-3 how to write recipes. It suggested a very plausible beef curry. I asked for one for "iPhone 11", it said "You're not really going to try and cook your iPhone, are you?" 😳.
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Fine-tuning the demo machines for Stripe Sessions! See you tomorrow.
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2/ Every single code change is verified within 15 minutes by running a battery of tests that would take 50 days to run on a single CPU. These automated tests detect and prevent problems much better than humans could.
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I’m proud of Stripe’s security and infra teams who have investigated and patched all our systems against the Log4j vulnerability since the moment the news dropped. Our pre-existing controls protected Stripe from any form of remote code execution.🧵.
On 2021-12-09, we immediately started investigating Stripe’s exposure to the Apache Log4j vulnerability. Our preexisting controls protected our systems and we found no impact. More here:
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Today we’re announcing Stripe’s newest piece of hardware—Stripe Reader S700—an Android-based smart reader that works with Terminal’s APIs and SDKs. It’s customizable, mobile, and can be used to take orders and accept payments.
Introducing Stripe Reader S700—a customizable smart reader for countertop and handheld use. Build a point-of-sale app with the Terminal API and SDK, then use the S700 for tableside ordering, loyalty programs, forms, tipping, and more. Coming soon:
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I keep wishing Google Docs had the fluid hands-on-keyboard editing experience of Notion or Dropbox Paper (seriously, why is this not a thing!?). So, I hacked it in Electron.
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My conversation with @AravSrinivas about @perplexity_ai—their journey so far, the tech behind it, and how search is evolving with AI. Thank you @AravSrinivas!
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My Android and Stripe worlds collide!.This week, we introduced Tap to Pay on Android—turning millions of Android devices into card readers. Users like @getsquire have integrated in just a couple of weeks. How we built it with @Android ⤵️.
💳📱 @Stripe built an SDK for Tap to Pay on Android using Google Play APIs and tools!. Tap to Pay on Android is an extension of the Terminal SDK, and it eliminates the need for additional hardware. Read their story and integrate today →
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At @Stripe, @openai's GPT-4 is enabling any engineer to become an AI engineer. This means we can quickly deploy powerful AI across Stripe to deliver even better products for users and more efficiency for us. (More on those deployments coming very soon.).
GPT-4 is here: our smartest and most reliable model yet! Try it today on ChatGPT or join the API waitlist. We're onboarding users swiftly, dependent on GPU availability.
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Stripe is continuing to expand in Canada—the Toronto office itself, our product offering, and our user-base (Canada’s now our third-largest market!). At our meetup tonight, it was great to chat with @sanjanabasu14 and @robjama and meet with so many local users. It’s an
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Today, fittingly, on @Stripe’s 11th birthday, we held a user meetup at our HQ in Dublin. Great to share advice on running and scaling businesses with @ciaraflood_, @arcurn, and @whelton.
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We will hire over a hundred remote engineers this year at @stripe . They will be deployed across every major engineering workstream. We have eng hubs in SF, Seattle, Dublin, Singapore and today Remote is becoming our 5th hub.
Stripe is doubling down on remote engineering. We’ll hire 100+ remote engineers this year.
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Examples: every engineer has their own devbox with a realistic environment provisioned by tools; we built a static typechecker for #Ruby and it has a beautifully intuitive syntax and finds real problems quickly. Try it: more:
It's public now: @Stripe is building a typechecker for #Ruby with emphasis on scalability and user-friendliness. Currently presenting it at #RubyKaigi with @nelhage and @ptarjan. Try it: . See it at Tachibana room at #RubyKaigi2018.
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Ledger: the nitty-gritty of Stripe’s system of record for financial data—and how we platformized it:
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I thoroughly recommend watching this talk from Sessions where you'll learn about our approach to API design and the raft of enhancements to our developer experience. Bonus: if you'd like to play the video game version of the talk (!), which I made as a virtual thank you card to.
Michelle is a video game completionist and Stripe engineer. At Sessions, she introduced four principles of quality API design compared to game mechanics, starting with the fog of war:
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A few times a year I do an "engineerication" (engineer+vacation), working directly with a team to deeply understand the developer experience at @Stripe. For my latest, I embedded with the Shepherd team building our next-gen ML platform based on @Airbnb's Chronon, now open source.
Shepherd: How Stripe adapted Chronon to scale ML feature development.
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Have gone fully San Francisco native - baked my first sourdough today. 🥖
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This Black Friday–Cyber Monday on Stripe, we saw >$18.6B in transaction volume and a peak of 27,395 requests per second—with >99.999% API uptime. More recap stats: Here's a video showing what our live dashboard looked like over the weekend.
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👏 Very proud of the team - a great example of our focus on 📈 developer productivity @Stripe. It’s also a great story - when big migrations go smoothly it’s often because of a lot of effort and thoughtful decisions behind the scenes. We should celebrate that work more often!.
Over the weekend, my team at @stripe converted the company's largest JS codebase from Flow to @typescript. We modified about 3.5 million lines of code, and then hundreds of developers came in Monday morning ready to write TS.
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I love this profile of our colleague @leleportella who moved to Dublin a few years ago and joined @stripe as a software engineer. We will be hiring lots more engineers in Dublin so I hope Letícia's story inspires more folks to make the move to Ireland ☘️
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Since the earliest days of our payments API, the developer experience has been at the core of what makes Stripe, Stripe. Learn more about our new tools, built in close consultation with all of you, our developer community:
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📖Stripe Docs now loads 48% faster than before. Building the sidebar took up to 46% of request time. Instead of fetching translations each time the page loads, we added an in-memory cache to significantly reduce latency.
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Big launch from our Checkout team today. ⬇️. Embed a prebuilt form into your site—and enjoy all the payment optimizations that come with Checkout: high conversion and the local payment methods your customers prefer. See what you can do with it:
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Behold my space grey and rose gold franken-Mac. We had two MacBooks, one had a broken screen, the other had a broken keyboard. Now they are one 💻.
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As an EU citizen, I’m proud that @Stripe is hiring for hundreds of new engineering jobs in Ireland. I spoke with @leaders_of_tech on how Ireland is increasingly becoming a great place to build a career in Tech—tune in this Thursday, Nov 18 at 12 PM GMT:
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"Explain it like I'm 5" has new depth when you actually have a 5 year old. Today: she asked me to explain both Climate Change and how the Universe was created 😳. (of course, I love to answer her questions!).
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Along the way we developed some useful tools to identify JVMs in need of patches and validate them. We shared these tools with other companies and have open sourced them today—if you’re still working through this we hope you find them useful.
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Over five years, Sorbet (@sorbet_ruby) has improved developer productivity while making our code @Stripe more delightful and understandable. We can’t wait to see what the next five years have in store.
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Needless to say, we're hiring! If you'd like to work with, or on, any of this:
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3/ In 2022, we deployed our core payments APIs 5,978 times (16.4 times a day on average).
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Delighted to be here at #stripesessions today and have the opportunity to share some of our teams’ amazing work with Stripe users. And a great opportunity to listen - excited to hear from some of the most ambitious companies in the world how we can serve you best.
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🤯 at how fast Llama-3 7b runs locally on my (now oldish) M1 Mac and how high quality it is.
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I'm excited to share technical details on the design and application of Stripe's database infrastructure. This is the key foundation that supports API uptime greater than 99.999%:
How Stripe’s document databases supported 99.999% uptime with zero-downtime data migrations:
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Pixel watch dropped - it’s 🤩. I’ve also written my own watch face to make it look just like my favorite mechanical watch. Nice work @WearOSbyGoogle team!
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Since Stripe launched in 2010, we've made >100 checkout optimizations. And for the first time, we quantified the accumulated impact of all these tweaks (big and small). Businesses switching to our newest checkout integration see 10.5% more revenue!.
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Behold! TOTP tokens on my wrist with the world's smartest dumb watch - a Sensor Watch board replacement for the ubiquitous Casio F-91W. Read all about how I got this working and wrote my own cadence meter watchface:
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Had an amazing time showing the kids the conjunction of saturn and jupiter tonight. We saw all the galilean moons of jupiter, clouds in jovian atmosphere and saturn's rings in the same frame! (cellphone camera through telescope eyepiece doesn't do it justice) 🔭🪐
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For folks interested in how Stripe does engineering, this deep dive in @Pragmatic_Eng lifts the curtain. Really enjoyed speaking with @GergelyOrosz!.
The future of web & backend development is increasingly full stack. Stripe seems to be a few years ahead the industry: for them, this has been a "norm" for years. "Backend" and "frontend" still exist on paper: but in reality, engineers work across the stack, shipping products.
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We embrace and extend the best tools in the industry - we've built on top of @code as our main editor over the last year and use community extensions + some of our own to streamline key use cases - easy to run unit tests inline, a debugger that actually works, etc.
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Amazon AWS terms of service are zombie apocalypse ready! Someone must have won a bet with this.
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We built a demo to show how usage-based billing could work for your SaaS, AI, or spaghetti business. Consumption is tracked and aggregated with our new Meters API, then an upcoming invoice is shown for how much you (or Will Smith) owe.
Introducing usage-based billing. Charge customers based on how much they use your product or service. Try the demo:
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Stripe is happy to be one of the first GitHub Copilot Extensions! Join the beta:
Today, we’re launching GitHub Copilot Extensions, bringing the world’s knowledge into the most widely adopted AI developer tool. <1/5>.
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I enjoyed speaking to @emmetjryan at @businessposthq about all things @Stripe at the @DubTechSummit last month. We really are still in the early days of Stripe, and we're looking for more builders to come help us!
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Our global engineering team -- now spread across hubs in Dublin, Singapore and Seattle, in addition to SF -- is bringing Stripe to new markets. If you want to help us, we’re hiring!
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We've just shipped a few improvements to the Stripe API Docs to make them snappier. Through a couple of code refactors and the addition of asynchronous loading for the slowest command, Docs are now 23% faster compared to last year and 72% faster compared to 2022.
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Does anyone have tips for fixing a Macbook keyboard if, say, your daughter smooshed hand soap all over it while on a Zoom call with their class? 💻🧼🤯Asking for a friend.
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Today I have been learning to paint with acrylics. It has been a lot of fun mixing all the colors from primaries. I also learned that I get into a flow state almost as deep as programming when painting. Oh and YouTube is 💯 for learn-to-paint videos. 🎨
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Today we’re open-sourcing Markdoc, the content-authoring system that powers . You can now build rich docs experiences, static pages, and more with the same tools we use: ✍️
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I’m away from SF for Thanksgiving. The night skies are dark here and tonight is crystal clear. There’s nothing quite as mind blowing as stepping outside to see thousands of bright stars. We are adrift in space. So small in a big big universe.
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I'm excited to be speaking at @SaaStrAnnual next Wednesday. In my talk, I’ll be covering the ideas behind Extreme Programming, how they relate to product design at SaaS companies, and share some examples from how we build things for our users at @Stripe.
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I’m making wine. It's delightful fusion of craft and science. I had no idea where this would take me - from harvesting grapes to exploring the micro-biology of fermentation. Way more complicated than I expected, but also way more fun. Read about it at
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Deploying code to production (and monitoring its health) is as simple as pushing a button in Github enterprise once your pull request is reviewed.
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It has been inspiring to work with the Stripe Apps team— true user focused craftspeople, and the fruit of their labors is 😍. Stripe Apps let developers extend and augment the Stripe Dashboard as a platform to accelerate their businesses. Check it out!.
Today we are launching the public beta of Stripe Apps, a new way for developers to extend @stripe and build on top of our platform. Some background on why we built Stripe Apps, what our platform enables you to build, and where we are headed. 🧵
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