Running Retrospectives People Do Not Dread
The retrospective is the one ceremony almost every team keeps and almost no team protects. When schedules tighten, the demo survives, standup survives, and the...
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Articles by Anselm Fowel — page 8
Handling Money in Code: Never Use Floats
Every engineer who has spent time near a payments ledger eventually learns the same lesson, usually at the worst possible moment: a reconciliation report is...
10 min870Read →
Hiring for Potential vs Experience
Every hiring decision is a bet on the future, but the two ways we frame that bet could not be more different. When I hire for experience, I am betting that the...
12 min650Read →
Caching Strategies Every Backend Engineer Should Know
Caching is one of those topics that sounds simple until you ship it. Add a cache, serve a few requests from memory, watch your latency graph drop, and call it...
10 min925Read →
The Case for Architecture Decision Records
Somewhere in every engineering organization there is a decision that nobody can explain. A queue sits between two services that could just as easily call each...
11 min464Read →
When to Use a Message Queue, and When Not To
Few pieces of infrastructure get reached for as reflexively as the message queue. Somewhere in the lifecycle of every growing system, an engineer looks at a...
12 min1001Read →
Building Psychological Safety on Your Team
Every engineering leader I know says they want psychological safety on their team. Far fewer can tell you what they actually changed to get it. The phrase has...
11 min321Read →
Idempotency Keys Explained Simply
Every payments engineer eventually meets the same ghost. A customer taps "Pay" once, the network hiccups, the mobile app retries on their behalf, and suddenly...
11 min1017Read →
The True Cost of Context Switching
Every engineering leader I know can recite the headline statistic about context switching: it takes something like twenty-three minutes to fully recover focus...
11 min866Read →
Rate Limiting Strategies for Payment APIs
Every payment platform I have helped build eventually runs into the same uncomfortable truth: the request you cannot afford to drop and the request you must...
11 min873Read →
How to Give Feedback That Lands
I have given a lot of feedback over the years, and for a long time I was bad at it. I confused honesty with effectiveness. I thought that if I said the true...
10 min437Read →
Database Migrations Without Downtime in .NET
Every team I have led eventually hits the same wall: the schema needs to change, the business cannot tolerate a maintenance window, and the database underneath...
10 min468Read →