In this post I will cover modern payment “rails”, blockchain-based systems, and close the “trilogy” with some parting thoughts on the future and how the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic will accelerate the evolution of the payment systems. In the previous 2 instalments (part 1, part 2) of this series, I talked…

Take a look around you. Try to count how many items are not imported. Chances are you have not managed to count many. With international trade so prevalent, money crossing borders is crucial to keep our world connected. But how does water turn into oil?¹ In the previous instalment of…

You are on holiday in another country. You want to buy a coffee. You get your card out, swipe or type your pin and presto! Coffee paid for your enjoyment. Congratulations! You just participated in the modern marvel of international payments. …

Other than the neighbourhood bakery and garage, pretty much every modern-day organisation worth its salt is a technology company. As software is eating the world at an increasing pace, focus is on delivery and pushing features out the door. That is the only way to stay ahead of the competition…

A fast-growing company has all kinds of good problems. One of them (admittedly the smallest) is the frequent question of new-joiners: “where does everyone sit in this new office?”. Luckily, regular hackathons give the opportunity to address all the issues (big or small) stacking up. This post will show a…

A couple of years ago I had the great privilege of partaking in the excellent Enterprise Engineer Program in RBS. This was jointly organized by Digital Engineering Services and Catalyst. The amount of knowledge, lessons and skills I took out of it is a future post by itself. What I…

I have been using Slack quite a lot this last year for my day-to-day work. Late adopter as I am, I have been using it both in a geographically distributed startup as well as a tightly-knit mature company. In both cases, it is a force multiplier. The benefits it brings…

PostgreSQL is an extremely performant database. We are using it heavily and to great effect in my current place of work. However the internal design choices of Postgres mean that you may be faced with performance degradation if not careful. From an application developer’s point-of-view there is an easily accessible…

What is your phone really doing? More specifically, what are the apps installed on your phone really doing? Do they just sit there? Do they constantly send data to their servers? Do you even know what is sending data where and how often? I had to answer this question recently…