Blog & insights.
Writing from our founder, Anselm Fowel — on fintech, engineering leadership, product craft, and building at scale. Articles live on anselmfowel.com and stream in here as they are published.
Why I Stopped Doing Stack Rankings
The last time I ran a forced ranking cycle, I spent a Tuesday afternoon arguing with two other directors about whether a payments engineer who had spent six...
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Building a Sandbox Environment for Partners
The first sandbox I ever shipped for partners was a lie. It shared a database with staging, the "reset" button quietly wiped one integrator's data while...
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Building a Culture Where People Ask for Help
A senior engineer on my team once spent eleven hours trying to reproduce a flaky failure in our settlement reconciliation job. Eleven hours, most of it on a...
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Designing a Webhook Retry Policy
The first time a webhook retry policy cost us real money, it wasn't because a webhook failed. It was because a webhook succeeded, and then we sent it four more...
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Feedback vs Criticism: Why the Difference Matters
A few years ago I sat in a design review where a senior engineer told a junior one that his caching layer was "a mess." That was the whole comment. The junior...
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How to Version an Event Schema
The first time an event schema change took down a downstream service, I was three years into running payments infrastructure and I still thought of events as...
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How to Kill a Project Gracefully
I have killed more projects than I have shipped. That is not a confession, it is a job description. If you run engineering for a payments company, most of your...
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Building a Currency Conversion Service
The first currency conversion bug I ever shipped cost us about 40 euros. A customer in Poland paid an invoice denominated in euros, we converted to zloty for...
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When Two Good Engineers Disagree
Two of my best engineers spent the better part of a week not speaking to each other properly. Not shouting, nothing dramatic. Just clipped Slack replies,...
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