Even though there are many benefits, accepting ACH payments—that is, payments where you charge a bank account directly—has traditionally been pretty difficult. Doing so has generally involved baroque, legacy APIs. There’s additional complexity compared to credit cards because the transaction amounts are typically larger and authorization is subtler. Still, being able to handle ACH payments with Stripe has come up a lot as a feature request over the years. And so, today, we’re delighted to launch support for ACH payments for all U.S. Stripe users.

Like many developers, we often contribute to open-source software in bits and pieces over long periods of time. So we started the Open-Source Retreat to help open-source developers make concentrated progress on features and releases with the potential for significant impact. For 2016’s Retreat, we’re inviting three developers to work on their projects from Stripe’s office in SF.

We increasingly rely on (and contribute back to!) a lot of open-source software to build Stripe, and we’d like to give back and get more people working on open-source.

Last year, we invited four developers to the Stripe office as part of our first Open-Source Retreat. Our grantees made significant progress on their projects in a relatively short time. Starting January, we’re hosting another Open-Source Retreat at Stripe.

In February 2013, we blogged about email transparency at Stripe. Since then a number of other companies have implemented their own versions of it (which a few have talked about publicly). We often get asked whether email transparency is still around, and if so, how we've scaled it.

A few months ago, we announced our Open-Source Retreat. Though we’d originally expected to sponsor two grantees, we ended up giving out three full grants (and then an additional shorter grant).

We rely on a lot of open-source software at Stripe, and over time we’ve contributed back our own share of patches and projects. We decided we’d like to do more, though, so we’re launching an open-source retreat program.

People tend to have a narrow view of the problems they can solve using GDB. Many think that GDB is just for debugging segfaults or that it's only useful with C or C++ programs. In reality, GDB is an impressively general and powerful tool. When you know how to use it, you can debug just about anything, including Python, Ruby, and other dynamic languages. It's not just for inspection either—GDB can also be used to modify a program's behavior while it's running.