The Manager's Guide to Saying No
Early in my career I thought that being a good engineering manager meant being a reliable yes. Yes to the new feature, yes to the cross-team favor, yes to the...
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Articles by Anselm Fowel — page 9
Designing Webhooks That Survive Failure
Webhooks are the part of a payments platform that everyone treats as an afterthought until the night they take down a customer's order pipeline. They look...
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Why Standups Fail and What to Do Instead
The daily standup is the most cargo-culted ritual in modern software teams. Somewhere along the way we decided that standing in a circle, going around the...
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The Pragmatic Guide to Adopting .NET 9 in Production
A new major .NET release arrives, and the team chat immediately splits into two camps: the people who want to upgrade this week because it is new, and the...
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From Code Reviews to Career Reviews: Growing the Engineers Around You
The single transition that most defined my growth as a leader was realizing that my job was no longer to write the best code in the room. It was to grow the...
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Designing a Compliance-First Data Model for African Fintech
In most software, the data model exists to serve the features. In regulated fintech, the data model also has to serve the auditor, the regulator, and a future...
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The Quiet Cost of Hero Culture in Engineering Teams
Every engineering organization has a hero. The person who saves the launch at the last minute, who fixes the outage nobody else understands, who works the...
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Observability for Payment Systems: Logs, Metrics, and Traces That Matter
When a payment fails at 2am, the question is never "is something wrong." Your customers have already told you that, loudly, across every channel you have. The...
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Hiring Senior Engineers in a Talent-Scarce Market: What Nigeria Taught Me
Hiring senior engineers is hard everywhere. Hiring them in a market like Nigeria's, where the most talented people are routinely recruited by companies paying...
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Practical AI in the Fintech Stack: Where It Helps and Where It Hurts
Every fintech pitch deck now has an AI slide, and most of them are aspirational at best and decorative at worst. Having actually shipped AI features into a...
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Running 1-on-1s That Actually Change Outcomes
The one-on-one is the most powerful tool a manager has and the most commonly wasted. Done well, it is where problems surface while they are still small, where...
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Securing Fintech APIs: A .NET Developer's Checklist
Security in a fintech API is not a feature you bolt on at the end, just before launch, when someone in compliance asks the uncomfortable question. It is a set...
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