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 Leader's Job During a Reorg
Reorganizations have a bad reputation, and most of the time they have earned it. People hear the word and brace for the worst: a shuffle of boxes on an org...
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Connection Pooling and Why It Matters
Most of the worst production incidents I have managed in fintech did not start with a dramatic failure. They started quietly, with a service that was perfectly...
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How to Disagree and Commit
Every engineering organization I have led eventually runs into the same wall. A decision needs to be made, the room is split, and the people in disagreement...
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Building a Notification Service That Scales
Notifications look like a small feature until you operate one at scale. Then you discover that the humble "we just send the customer an email" requirement is...
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The Right Way to Run a Postmortem
Every engineering organization eventually learns that incidents are not the exception. They are part of the operating model. Systems fail, dependencies...
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Tokenization vs Encryption for Card Data
Every few months a product manager or a board member asks me some version of the same question: "We encrypt the card numbers, so we are PCI compliant and safe,...
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Why Burnout Is a System Problem
For most of my career I treated burnout the way I treated a flaky integration: as a symptom of someone, somewhere, not being careful enough. If an engineer was...
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Circuit Breakers and Graceful Degradation
Every distributed system fails. That is not a pessimistic statement; it is an operational one. In the payments platforms I have run, the question was never...
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Building a Culture of Documentation
Every engineering organization I have led has reached the same uncomfortable moment. A senior engineer leaves, a critical incident hits at two in the morning,...
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