Having worked in financial services for most of my career I want to share some the software engineering challenges that are associated with tracking and moving money digitally. Most of these lessons have been learned the hard way. Hopefully they will be useful to anyone moving into the fintech space.

We think that generative AI creativity is limited by its training data and algorithms, and therefore can produce technically proficient content, but not truly novel and innovative content. We like to believe that our own creativity and innovation, rooted in personal experience, knowledge, and human emotions results in intentionality and emotional depth that cannot be replicated by AI. Current research contradicts that view.

The Biden administration has collected “voluntary commitments” from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon to pursue shared AI safety and transparency goals ahead of a planned executive order. Will it be enough?

Corporate bullsh*t can be a handy supply of manure for fertilizing new ideas and innovation. Corporate bullsh*t also has a number of negative effects on both employees and organizations, including a tendency to suppress those with differing opinions and perspectives. The most detrimental consequence of rampant organizational bullsh*t is the corrosion of organizational decision-making. Can you spot it?

Joel Spolsky (of Fog Creek Software and Stack Overflow) describes system re-writes as “the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make”. However, engineering teams love full rewrites because they incorrectly think of old systems as specs. They assume that since the old system works, all functional aspects have been settled. Design risks have been eliminated! They can focus on making changes to the underlying architecture without worry. This is a deeply flawed assumption.

“We just landed one of the biggest deals in our company’s history. To close the deal, we promised the customer a few things. I trust you to make it happen. Don’t worry, what they want is really basic.”