Why Software Estimates Are Hard
Every quarter, someone asks me the same question in a slightly different costume. Sometimes it is a board member who wants a date for the new ledger...
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Articles by Anselm Fowel — page 7
Retry Logic and Exponential Backoff
Every payment platform I have run eventually develops a relationship with failure. Not the catastrophic kind that wakes you at three in the morning, but the...
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Managing Up Without Losing Yourself
Early in my career I thought managing up was a euphemism for office politics, the kind of thing people did instead of shipping. I was wrong, but not entirely....
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Feature Flags Done Right
Every engineering team I have led eventually reaches the same uncomfortable moment: a release is ready, the code is merged, and yet nobody is quite willing to...
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Mentoring vs Coaching: Knowing the Difference
Somewhere around my third year leading engineering, I realised I was using two words interchangeably that I had no business confusing. I told a senior backend...
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Building a Reconciliation Engine
Every payments company eventually runs into the same uncomfortable truth: the money you think you have and the money you actually have are two different...
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How to Onboard an Engineer in Their First 30 Days
I have onboarded enough engineers over the years to know that the first thirty days are not about ramping someone to full productivity. They are about...
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Understanding Eventual Consistency
Every engineer who has built a payments platform eventually runs into the same uncomfortable truth: the moment your system spans more than one database, one...
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The Quiet Power of Writing Things Down
Early in my career, I believed that the strongest engineers were the ones who could hold the whole system in their heads. They could talk through a payment...
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Managing Secrets in .NET Applications
Every breach post-mortem I have read in the last decade has a secrets problem buried somewhere in it. A connection string in a config file checked into source...
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Why Your Roadmap Keeps Slipping
Every engineering leader I know has a version of the same recurring conversation. A roadmap gets committed in a planning session, everyone nods, the quarter...
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An Introduction to Double-Entry Ledgers in Software
Every few years a new engineer joins one of my teams, looks at our ledger code for the first time, and asks the same question: why are there two rows for every...
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