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.