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.
The First Team Principle for Leaders
Most leaders, when asked to name their team, point downward. They describe the engineers, the product managers, the analysts who report to them. That answer...
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An Engineer's Introduction to PCI DSS
Every engineer who touches a payments system eventually runs into PCI DSS, usually at the worst possible moment: a few weeks before a deadline, when someone in...
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Why Software Estimates Are Hard
Every quarter, someone asks me the same question in a slightly different costume. Sometimes it is a board member who wants a date for the new ledger...
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Retry Logic and Exponential Backoff
Every payment platform I have run eventually develops a relationship with failure. Not the catastrophic kind that wakes you at three in the morning, but the...
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Managing Up Without Losing Yourself
Early in my career I thought managing up was a euphemism for office politics, the kind of thing people did instead of shipping. I was wrong, but not entirely....
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Feature Flags Done Right
Every engineering team I have led eventually reaches the same uncomfortable moment: a release is ready, the code is merged, and yet nobody is quite willing to...
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Mentoring vs Coaching: Knowing the Difference
Somewhere around my third year leading engineering, I realised I was using two words interchangeably that I had no business confusing. I told a senior backend...
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Building a Reconciliation Engine
Every payments company eventually runs into the same uncomfortable truth: the money you think you have and the money you actually have are two different...
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How to Onboard an Engineer in Their First 30 Days
I have onboarded enough engineers over the years to know that the first thirty days are not about ramping someone to full productivity. They are about...
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