@pp_macole
Senior Integration Engineer for PayPal
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Emacs. Forever Emacs. :-) In all seriousness, it depends on what I'm doing. Like Kent said, PayPal does allow you a fair amount of autonomy in what software you use to do your job. Lately my main tools have been Atom, Chrome, and iTerm2 -- but I also keep a copy of things like SoapUI, Eclipse, Android Developer Studio, Xcode, and XMLSpy for doing other, more specialized tasks.
Personally speaking, I don't think it's going to happen in the near future. Until something is really mainstream, it's a pain to get merchants to start accepting something -- and even then, some seem to hold out longer than others. I commend the handful of sites that have started accepting it, but I think that there needs to be some huge push to get the rest of the world to use it -- and I don't know that there's really any driving force that's pushing people to accept Bitcoin right now.
We're generally going to be looking at a lot of different factors (depending on what the API is going to do exactly), but -- speaking from experience -- I can tell you that some of the things we look at are: What does the API do? Is it going to have access to any customer data or PCI-sensitive data? What data is it going to expose to the outside world? (We have to pay close attention to applicable privacy laws...especially in places like the EU, where privacy is more strict than in the US) Are there going to be legal or compliance impacts? Is the application serving this API properly isolated? (e.g., it should only have as much access as it needs to function properly) Is the application using prepared statements for any DB queries it's doing? Depending on the answers to those questions, we tend to do a deeper dive into what the API is doing and how it's doing it to make sure that not only is PayPal going to be safe, but our customers as well.
Pretty much everything we have runs on Oracle. We've been using them since the beginning of PayPal -- in fact, we only recently phased out one of the databases that traced its roots all the way back to Confinity. We figured out pretty early on that Oracle connections are expensive to open, so we actually wrote a thing called the Oracle Connection Cache (or OCC for short) -- it keeps a cache of open connections to our Oracle servers and speeds up DB queries quite a bit. As far as NoSQL databases...I'm not aware of any that we use on our production systems. I think there might be some that we use for doing analytics on our back-end.
Honestly, the most I hear about the PayPal founders is when they get mentioned in financial articles -- e.g., "Today, PayPal founder Elon Musk announced that he's building a hyperloop to Alpha Centauri in the next 5 years...". But honestly, I've never seen them on campus or even heard them talked about that often. (Granted, I work from Omaha most of the time...but I think the same is true of most of our San Jose folks.) Oh man, so hard to pin it down to one thing. First one: my managers. They're awesome people, and they're always supportive of everything I do. Anytime I run into an issue, I know they've got my back. Second: sabbaticals. Every 5 years, PayPal gives you a 4-week paid sabbatical. (Granted, I stayed home for my first one...but there's a lot of people that come back with some amazing stories about what they did.) Third one: In San Jose, soda is free. (In Omaha, 20oz bottles are $0.50, 12oz cans are $0.25.) It's hard for me to decide. On the one hand, a lot of effort nowadays is going towards Braintree. On the other hand, I know that the PayPal stack has a lot of awesome solutions as well (hint: we have a lot of solutions that we don't advertise publicly). Bottom line, I'd say this: if you want to be able to do credit cards directly on your site, go with Braintree. They have some awesome JS code that automatically sends your buyers' CC info directly to them, so that you don't have to worry about it passing through your system. If you want the trust that comes with the PayPal checkout (or you don't care about taking credit cards directly on your site), go with PayPal.
I like that they're very developer focused. I mean, heck -- they have the code right on their home page showing you how to run a credit card transaction, and it's not very long. I wish all of our products were that easy. But...there's a couple of growing pains to being a big payments company: (a) regulators look at you with more scrutiny, and (b) you really have to do everything you can to prevent fraud losses. We're handling that pretty well today. I'm not sure Stripe is there just yet.