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.
Caching Without the Invalidation Nightmares
A few years ago I inherited a payments dashboard that showed merchants their settled balance. It was fast, users loved it, and roughly once a week someone in...
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Tech Lead vs Engineering Manager: The Real Difference
A few years ago I promoted a brilliant engineer into what everyone in the room called a "lead" role, and within a quarter both of us were quietly miserable. He...
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Understanding Consistency in Event Sourcing
A payments team I worked with once spent three days chasing a phantom. Their ledger showed a merchant balance of 4,812 euros in one screen and 4,798 in...
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Coaching an Engineer Who Will Not Take Feedback
He was one of the best engineers I had. Fast, precise, the kind of person who could hold a payments reconciliation flow in his head and spot the edge case...
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Building a Dead Letter Queue That Works
A dead letter queue is where messages go to be forgotten. That is the dirty secret nobody tells you when they draw the tidy architecture diagram with the...
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The Weekly Business Review for Engineering Teams
Amazon runs a thing called the Weekly Business Review, a standing meeting where a fixed deck of operational metrics gets walked, line by line, every week. I...
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The Dual-Write Problem and How to Avoid It
A few years ago one of my teams shipped a feature that felt trivial in review: when a payment settled, we wrote the settlement record to Postgres and then...
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Leading When You Are Not the Most Technical in the Room
The first engineering team I led at scale had two people who were, without question, better engineers than me. One could hold an entire distributed ledger...
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How We Handle Schema Evolution in Events
A few years ago I inherited a payments platform where the events team and the billing team had quietly disagreed about what a field called amount meant. One...
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