The Engineer-to-Lead Transition
The most consequential promotion of my career was also the one I was least prepared for. I had spent years getting good at writing systems that settled...
12 min390Read →
Articles by Anselm Fowel — page 5
Designing for Audit Trails from Day One
Every fintech founder I have worked with eventually has the same uncomfortable conversation with an auditor, a regulator, or a partner bank's risk team. The...
11 min975Read →
Setting Goals That Do Not Become Theater
Every leadership team I have worked in eventually discovers the same uncomfortable truth: the goals you write down quietly become the goals you optimize for,...
11 min781Read →
Background Jobs in .NET: A Practical Guide
Every payments platform I have worked on eventually grows a second nervous system. Alongside the request-response code that answers an API call in...
11 min361Read →
The Cost of Always Being Available
Somewhere along the way, availability stopped being a courtesy and became an expectation. I noticed it in myself first: the reflexive glance at a phone during...
11 min915Read →
Understanding Webhook Signatures
Almost every fintech integration I have shipped eventually grows a webhook surface. Card networks, payment processors, KYC vendors, ledger systems, and...
10 min431Read →
Making Skip-Level 1-on-1s Useful
Skip-level 1-on-1s are one of those practices that sound obviously good and usually deliver almost nothing. You block thirty minutes with someone two layers...
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API Versioning Strategies
Every API I have shipped in a regulated payments environment eventually outlives the assumptions it was born with. A field that was optional becomes mandatory,...
11 min523Read →
The Underrated Skill of Writing Good Tickets
I have spent a fair amount of my career watching brilliant engineers ship the wrong thing. Not because they were careless, and not because they lacked the...
10 min783Read →
Building Multi-Currency Support
Every payments platform reaches a moment where a single currency stops being enough. For us it arrived the day a logistics customer in France asked whether...
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Why Great Engineers Sometimes Make Poor Managers
Over the years I have promoted more engineers into management than I can easily count, and I have watched a meaningful fraction of those promotions struggle....
11 min627Read →
The Outbox Pattern for Reliable Events
Every distributed system I have built in fintech eventually runs into the same uncomfortable question: how do you change your database and tell the rest of the...
10 min887Read →