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.
Setting Team Norms That Actually Hold
A few years ago I inherited a team with a wiki page titled "Engineering Norms." It had eleven bullet points, a nice header image, and not a single line anyone...
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Building a Rate-Limited Public API
The first version of our public API had no rate limiting at all. It survived for about four months, right up until a customer's integration developer wrote a...
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Why Most Reorgs Fail
I have lived through six reorgs as either the person drawing the boxes or the person being drawn into one. Exactly one of them worked. The other five were...
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When a Monolith Is the Right Call
A few years ago I sat in a planning meeting where a senior engineer proposed splitting our payments platform into fourteen services. We had eleven engineers. I...
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The Quiet-Quitting Conversation
Marta had been one of my best backend engineers for three years. Then, over about four months, she stopped volunteering for anything. She still shipped. Her...
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The Cost of Premature Microservices
Three years ago I inherited a payments platform that had been split into 47 microservices by a team of nine engineers. Nine people, 47 services. A single card...
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Giving a Promotion That Actually Sticks
The worst promotion I ever handed out looked perfect on paper. Strong engineer, three years of shipping, well-liked, ready for the title. I gave him the Senior...
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Handling Personal Data the Right Way in .NET
A few years ago I inherited a payments service that stored full customer date-of-birth, national ID, and unmasked PAN fragments in the same table it used for...
Read articleRunning a Hiring Loop That Respects Everyone's Time
The worst hiring loop I ever sat in ran seven rounds over five weeks and ended with a candidate we all liked telling us, politely, that she'd taken another...
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