Junior developers look at a payment integration and see an API call. Senior developers see a distributed system problem with money attached.
What it actually involves: partial failure handling, idempotency keys, currency conversion, reconciliation, chargeback workflows, PCI-DSS compliance, webhook verification, rate limiting, and failover in under 200ms.
Afripay taught me every one of these lessons in production — $8M+ annually, 18+ gateway APIs, 99.95% accuracy.
Build payment infrastructure with the same rigour you would build a bridge. People's livelihoods cross it every day.
— Dick Bassey | DevDick | 2016