Susan Fowler joins Stripe as editor-in-chief of new quarterly publication Increment

Stripe today is launching a new quarterly publication called Increment, featuring opinion pieces, expert interviews and how-to guides targeted at an engineering audience. To manage the site and all the content being produced for it, the company announced it hired Susan Fowler as editor in chief.

The idea behind Increment was to create a standalone site to explore different topics that are important to software engineers and teams. It’s designed to act as a sort of central repository for Stripe and others in the industry to share knowledge, including tips and best practices for building software and scaling tech businesses.

At the helm is Fowler, an engineer and author who has literally written the book on building standardized systems within software teams and has worked at tech companies like Plaid, PubNub and Uber. Most recently, however, Fowler has been in the public eye after publishing a blog post publicly accusing Uber HR of ignoring multiple reports of sexual harassment and sexism within the company.

That post has been part of a larger series of scandals and setbacks for the ride-hailing company. Fowler, meanwhile, has been working at Stripe and trying to get Increment off the ground. She was not available for interview, in part due to legal concerns related to the ongoing investigation into her claims.

According to a Stripe representative, the framework for the site came about after Fowler and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison met to discuss her blog and writing. That ended up leading to a discussion around what would later become Increment. In coming up with their blueprint, they were inspired by sites like High Scalability, DZone, InfoQ, the C2 Wiki and Y Combinator’s The Macro.

While it might seem strange for Stripe to be launching a site offering advice and tips around developing software at scale, it’s part of a broader initiative to build tools for knowledge sharing within the tech community. To that end, the company recently launched a forum as part of its Stripe Atlas program, and also announced that it acquired knowledge-sharing community Indie Hackers earlier this week.

For Increment, the plan is to focus on a particular theme with each issue. This quarter, the publication is all about how software teams deal with on-call and incident response, but a spokesperson says Stripe intends to share themes for upcoming issues on the site and will encourage readers to submit proposals for feature and future opinion pieces.