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 Your 1-on-1s Should Change as People Grow
I still run a weekly 1-on-1 with an engineer I hired seven years ago as a junior. Back then, most of our thirty minutes went to me unblocking her: which...
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How to Do Zero-Downtime Deploys
The first time I took down a payments platform during business hours, it was for a version bump. Not a migration, not a big-bang rewrite, just a routine deploy...
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Handling Competing Priorities From Two Stakeholders
The worst version of this fight I ever refereed was between our Head of Risk and our VP of Sales, and it played out over a single field on a merchant...
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Building a Config System You Will Not Regret
The worst outage I have signed off on in the last five years started with a single environment variable. Someone flipped a payout batch size from 100 to 10000...
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What a Meeting-Free Day Actually Buys You
Two years ago I blocked out every Wednesday and told my calendar it was closed. No standups, no one-on-ones, no vendor demos, no "quick syncs" that somehow run...
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The Case for Feature-Based Folder Structure
The first thing I do when I inherit a codebase is open the folder tree and look at the top level. Not the README, not the architecture diagram somebody drew...
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Succession Planning for Engineering Teams
The best staff engineer I ever worked with left on a Friday with three weeks' notice, and by the following Wednesday I understood that he had been the sole...
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How to Profile a Slow .NET Endpoint
Last spring one of our payout endpoints started taking eleven seconds at the 95th percentile. Not always. Just often enough that support tickets trickled in...
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How to Say I Do Not Know as a Leader
A few years ago I sat in a board meeting where a director asked me whether our new payment routing engine could handle a specific failover scenario across two...
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