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...
11 min431Read →
Articles by Anselm Fowel — page 4
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...
11 min359Read →
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...
12 min910Read →
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...
12 min926Read →
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...
11 min735Read →
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...
12 min781Read →
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...
11 min1001Read →
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,...
11 min441Read →
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...
11 min953Read →
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...
11 min745Read →
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,...
12 min621Read →
Database Indexing for Application Developers
Most application developers treat the database as a black box. They write a query, it returns rows, and as long as the page loads in under a second nobody asks...
11 min720Read →