Leading Through Uncertainty
Every leader claims to thrive under pressure, but uncertainty is a different beast than pressure. Pressure has a shape: a deadline, a launch, an audit you can...
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Articles by Anselm Fowel — page 6
Optimistic vs Pessimistic Locking
Every payments engineer eventually meets the same enemy: two requests that arrive at almost the same instant, both convinced they are operating on the truth. A...
11 min346Read →
Career Ladders That Actually Motivate
Every few years I rediscover the same uncomfortable truth: the career ladder I inherited was built to satisfy HR and finance, not to motivate engineers. It...
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Building a Fraud Detection Pipeline
Fraud detection is one of those problems that looks deceptively simple from the outside. Someone makes a payment, you decide whether it is legitimate, and you...
10 min723Read →
The Meeting Audit Every Team Needs
Every engineering organization I have worked in has a quiet, expensive problem hiding in plain sight: the calendar. Meetings accrete like sediment. A standup...
11 min610Read →
Structured Logging in .NET
Every incident review I have ever sat through eventually arrives at the same uncomfortable question: what was the system actually doing at the moment it...
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Handling a Production Incident Calmly
Every engineering leader remembers their first real production incident. Mine was a payment authorization gateway that started timing out at the worst possible...
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How AI Is Changing Code Review
Code review has been one of the quiet constants of software engineering for most of my career. The mechanics changed over the years, from emailed patches to...
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Delegation Is a Skill, Not a Reflex
For years I treated delegation as something that happened automatically once I had enough people. Hire competent engineers, point them at problems, and the...
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Designing Idempotent Event Consumers
Every distributed payments platform I have built eventually arrives at the same uncomfortable truth: messages get delivered more than once. Not occasionally,...
12 min485Read →
The First Team Principle for Leaders
Most leaders, when asked to name their team, point downward. They describe the engineers, the product managers, the analysts who report to them. That answer...
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An Engineer's Introduction to PCI DSS
Every engineer who touches a payments system eventually runs into PCI DSS, usually at the worst possible moment: a few weeks before a deadline, when someone in...
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