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.
Running Sprint Planning That People Respect
The worst sprint planning meeting I ever sat through ran for three hours and ended with nobody able to say what we were actually building that week. Fourteen...
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What a Decade in Fintech Taught Me
When I started in fintech, the word itself still carried a faint whiff of novelty. We were the upstarts, the people building software around the edges of banks...
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Designing Safe Database Schema Changes
Of all the operational risks I worry about as a CTO in regulated payments, the one that keeps recurring in postmortems is not a fancy distributed-systems...
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The Habits of Calm Engineering Teams
I have managed engineering teams through payment outages on the busiest shopping day of the year, through regulatory audits that arrived with two weeks notice,...
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Observability Beyond Logging
For the first decade of my career, observability meant one thing: logs. When something broke, you SSH'd into a box, tailed a file, and grepped for the word...
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When to Build vs Buy
Every engineering leader I know has a build-versus-buy decision sitting in their backlog right now, and most of them are getting it wrong in one of two...
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Handling Timezones and Dates Correctly
Of all the categories of bugs I have seen ship to production over a twenty-year career, the ones rooted in date and time handling are the most insidious. They...
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Protecting Maker Time on an Engineering Team
Every engineering organization I have led has eventually run into the same quiet crisis. The team is busy. Calendars are full. Slack never stops. And yet the...
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Designing a Settlement System
Settlement is the part of a payments business that nobody talks about and everybody fights about in production. It is the machinery that takes the noisy stream...
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