I think the New Year hangover is starting to clear⊠And weâre looking ahead to a brilliant 2019.
This time of year is perfect to set your yearly goals and figure out what you really want to achieve in the next 12 months. And thatâs exactly what weâre doing here at Monzo!
One thing that you may or may not know about our Product development is that weâre split into different squads depending on the overall goals. One of those squads is the Savings Squad, and our guest this week can tell you all about it!
Do you have any more concrete plans on paying for direct debits from pots (ring-fencing bills)?
I was talking to @simon about this and an idea I had was to allow selection of a target pot from the ârecurring paymentsâ view, plus a ârecurring paymentsâ tab on the pot itself.
Also, how did you get into Android development? Iâm always curious of peoplesâ routes into app development.
I honestly canât think of a reason why we wouldnât. I believe itâs quite a nice offering to also be able to manage your money from your Chromebook!
We have discussed it in the past as a team and itâs certainly something that we want to offer. Right now it just hasnât had time given to it as we know we can make much more impact focusing our time on mobile phones.
Since I havenât actually investigated this personally, Iâm not actually sure of the main blocker, although I know weâd definitely have to spend some time making the experience a better one since weâd be dealing with completely different screen sizes/ratios. Iâm afraid of seeing what that would look like! Maybe this can be something for a Monzo Time project soon, especially since Chromebook usage in general is constantly growing.
The app is sitting at currently about 96% Kotlin and itâs been a gradual effort over the past year or so.
Weâve decided to take an approach of converting Java files to Kotlin once we have to touch them to complete a feature. This means it doesnât become an extremely tedious task, but we will eventually end up with an 100% Kotlin conversion.
I certainly do! I really value the #android Slack channel and all the feedback that you all give. Itâs really helpful on a daily basis and itâs lovely to see a direct response to features weâve shipped. This certainly puts a smile on my face! At the end of the day, we do it all for the users and to make money work for everyone.
Maybe Iâd redesign the Account tab to ensure that each of my Pots doesnât take up my whole screen. Naa but seriously, I think Iâd have to go with Account Aggregation; being able to show users all the money they have across any other bank accounts is a lovely idea with Open Banking. This would really help with boosting Monzoâs offering and allow you to manage your money better. Considering that not everyone is #FullMonzo, I think this would make a big impact and weâre all about big impact!
Favourite Android appâŠthatâs always a tough question for me! I use so many and there really are loads of great apps these days. Iâd probably have to point you at some core Google apps though; I think theyâre often taken for granted but theyâre pretty darn magical. Google Photos and Maps have to be two of my favourite apps. The idea that I can launch an app and instantly map a route to anywhere in the world (business listings and places included) is a pretty crazy offering. Similarly with Photos, itâs lovely to have a historical timeline of my whole life accessible from any device I log in to. Also being able to search keywords or locations and see every photo of that thing/person in a matter of a couple of seconds would have blown my mind a few years back.
No worries, not a problem at all! These may be the obvious answers, but the best thing has to be how concisely you can write Kotlin. In some cases, the comparison is quite ridiculous, 10 lines down to 1 or 2. Luckily here weâre not measured in lines of code produced (and I hope nobody is! ) , otherwise I think switching to Kotlin would have put us all out of a job! The worst thing was undoubtedly just starting with Kotlin. Having known Java and using it pretty much daily since 2010, switching to a language youâve never used before is definitely not going to be a nice experience initially. You have to accept that for a long while youâll struggle through the learning curve and lose all the prior knowledge/confidence you used to have. I can definitely say Iâm glad to have bitten the bullet now.
Every week at Monzo, we as the Android team have an âAndroid Chatâ where we discuss future improvements to the codebase and new conventions. Weâre trusted as a smaller team to decide how to take the app forward and donât have to get sign off on decisions like this. Although it was before my time when the switch was first decided upon, I can almost certainly guarantee that everyone in the chat was jumping up and down with excitement about the switch and nobody would have said no to this. This is a lucky position to be in as I know it can often be hard to convince stakeholders at other companies that Kotlin should be the way to proceed. Itâll involve lots of discussions where you have to state that for a couple of months the team wonât be making any perceivable forward momentum but itâs better for the long term.