December 2019 Summaries

Judd Blair is an engineering manager at Plaid, who has made a significant transition from being an engineer to managing teams. He attributes his growth as an EM to learning how to rely on his team and focus on what he can do to help them achieve their best work, rather than trying to solve problems alone. Judd's experience has also taught him the importance of teamwork and balancing operational excellence with team health and culture. He credits Plaid for maintaining its culture while scaling up, and values the company's thoughtful approach to decision-making. Judd's interests lie in software engineering, cooking, music, and photography, which he pursues in his free time by being deliberate about what he chooses to focus on and not letting other activities atrophy. He is proud of the team he works with at Plaid, who value his opinions and set a high bar for collaboration.

Plaid developed a custom bootloader to manage common configuration parameters and dependencies across its diverse set of internal services. The decision was made due to the lack of an out-of-the-box solution that met all their needs, and they wanted to avoid integrating with numerous new tools. The bootloader has since been extended to handle several other use cases such as application configuration, logging, and supervision. It has helped improve the reliability and feature set of Plaid's logging infrastructure, enabled better control over service lifecycles, and standardized application configuration across different environments.

Zirtue is an app that digitizes friends-and-family lending on a simple online platform, providing structure and accountability to borrowers and lenders alike. The company's user base has grown significantly over the last year, with 60% month-over-month growth. Many users, who may be struggling with credit card debt or lack access to traditional forms of credit, find Zirtue valuable for its ability to allow them to borrow from people they know and trust. However, a key challenge was that many transactions involved smaller banks and credit unions, which can be difficult to access. To address this issue, Zirtue partnered with Plaid, a company that connects to all 11,642 American banks and credit unions, resulting in a significant increase in conversion rates to nearly every potential borrower and lender.

We increased our Node service's parallelism by 30 times, which equated to a cost savings of about $300k annually. To achieve this, we carefully planned and executed the rollout, relying on good tooling, observability, and debugging. We addressed several bottlenecks in our system, including memory allocation issues due to V8 heap size limitations, garbage collection time optimization, CPU usage optimization, and JSON serialization performance improvements. Our approach involved using Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, LaunchDarkly feature flags, 0x package for profiling, and local benchmarks to identify and fix performance issues. The migration simplified our architecture and reduced our annual EC2 instance spend by $300k while making our system more robust to external request latencies or spikes in API traffic from customers.

We're excited to announce new Plaid Link SDKs on Android and React Native, making it easier to integrate with Plaid across mobile devices for a seamless user experience. The new SDKs are officially supported by our mobile teams, providing seamless integration and no need to maintain your own SDKs. With the Rip & replace feature, integrating is straightforward, and you can get access to the latest features simply by changing the version number. This allows developers to start building with Link Android and React Native in their apps today, taking advantage of improved integrations and a more streamlined experience for users across web, iOS, and Android devices.

In November 2019, Plaid expanded its services by launching in France, Spain, and Ireland in beta mode, supporting major financial institutions such as Société Générale, Santander, and AIB. Developers can now access Transactions, Identity, Auth, Balance, and Assets to gain a comprehensive view of consumers' finances. Plaid added over 300 new investment institutions and improved the Item Status endpoint for Investments. Event logs were introduced in the Dashboard to facilitate troubleshooting, while developers can now manage teams more easily from one account. Additionally, Plaid officially supports Link on React Native with a new SDK.