Monzo Staff Weekly Q&A - Jonas Huckestein (Co-Founder & Chief Technical Officer)

What is your super power? Do you have the opportunity to incorporate it into your working life at Monzo on a regular basis?

2 Likes

Do you have any plans once you step back from your role as CTO? Any cool new opportunities to explore?

What’s your favourite text editor? Atom? Sublime?

What do people in the office generally use?

3 Likes

Will you be doing any more Monzo hackathons?

Do you think new fintechs will ever displace the huge card network duopoly of visa and MasterCard? If so what path could they take?

4 Likes

Where are you going for your honeymoon :smiley:

Meri Williams will be officially taking over the role in September, while she handles her transition from Moo to Monzo. Huckestein, meanwhile, is off on his honeymoon.

Programming is something I’ve been interested in for a while, I did a module on it in Uni (Objective-C & C#) and I’d like to get more into it.

What languages are your favorites / do you use regularly and why?
What good resources are out there for beginners and what languages would you suggest I look into more?

Backend/app development interests me the most :slight_smile: :desktop_computer:

I created a thread about this if anyone wanted to post further: Programming

2 Likes

What one feature would you build & launch today if you had a magic wand?

16 Likes

:wave:Hey all, thanks so much for all the questions so far. I have set aside an hour this afternoon to answer them. Chat soon :soon:

7 Likes

Where do you see Monzo in December 2018?
How about in 5 years?
What do you think can stop Monzo from achieving its goal?

1 Like

What piece of advice (financial or otherwise) would you give to a young person/younger self gearing up to enter the working/adult world?

Also, has it been somewhat strange working in the same company as your fiancé?

P.S. All the best on your marriage and future endeavours :champagne:

1 Like

Okay, let’s do this

cracks knuckles

4 Likes

What prompted you to start a Bank?

Tom did :slight_smile: I was always more interested in making the machine that makes the thing, rather than whatever the thing actually is

And how are you planning to try to make yourself redundant?

I always struggled with this, but having a deadline (in this case my six week honeymoon) helps. Here’s what I posted in a company wide announcement last week:

That really helped and my diary and responsibilities immediately got lighter

FWIW, I haven’t been coding anymore for 18 months, so most of my responsibilities were around hiring decisions, coordination and staffing levels between teams, etc

11 Likes

What are you really excited for in the next 6 months? :slight_smile:

Meri starting and taking six weeks off to observe the “summer of Monzo” from a safe distance :slight_smile:

6 Likes

Are you ballin so big that you can now have a money gun?

No

4 Likes

What’s the most above and beyond tech related feature/process you think Monzo will get to?

I think our microservices platform has really paid off. It was a huge investment in the beginning, when it certainly would have been easier to build the bank as a quick rails or django app.

But now, we have over 600 microservices and over 100 production deployments each day by a dozen different squads. And most of them don’t interfere with each other or even have to know about each other.

I have seen this wrong previously and am very thankful to past us that we invested so much time into a platform that, at the time, was a little too big for us

11 Likes

What differences do you find between working at tech startups in Silicon Valley compared to in London?

I think it is harder for startups in London to take truly huge ambitions seriously. For better or for worse, a lot of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley set out to have the largest possible impact. They want a billion users, global scale, a company to outlast all companies, etc… It all just goes without saying. In London, when we say “We are aiming for a billion users”, people often roll their eyes at us. I sometimes think of my role in the business as saying the outrageously ambitious things until everyone first repeats them and eventually believes them

Another thing I think is different is that employees in London don’t value startup equity as highly. In SF everyone knows somebody who was able to purchase a home or at least a car because they were one of the first several hundred staff of a huge tech firm that IPOd. In London there aren’t many examples of that, so people tend not to pay a huge amount of attention to that part of job offers

6 Likes

where is the honeymoon destination ?

We’ll see :wink: We have booked a one way flight to Vancouver and will then likely rent a campervan and tour down the pacific northwest. Towards the end of the trip we may stop by burning man (if we can get tickets)

It seemed a bit indulgent to spend much time planning the honeymoon when not even every aspect of the wedding is planned all the way through :wink:

7 Likes

Did you already have a system architecture in mind when you co-founded Monzo, or did you develop it with the initial team? Either way, what process did you go through to come up with the foundations on which Monzo was built?

The backend architecture was heavily influenced by Matt and Oli’s experience from Hailo. In particular the idea of very small microservices, using Go and using Cassandra as our primary database came from there.

The design of the platform arose from the following constraints

  • We didn’t know a huge amount about banking. We were very conscious that whatever functionality we’d build, we would probably have to rebuild a few times from scratch before we got it right. So we wanted it to be easy to rebuild entire components quickly

  • The people in the team knew how to make robust distributed service platforms already

  • We knew we didn’t want to do a huge “replatforming” once we hit scale, because that is very difficult to do without taking downtime (see for example Twitter’s famous “failwhale” phase; or from personal experience, in 2011/2012 Groupon had a similar period of lots of downtime)

  • We knew we had to go through a lengthy banking licence application before we could go live. At the time we didn’t know we were going to launch a prepaid card first

All of this led to our decision to invest heavily (well, as heavily as you can with 4 backend engineers) in building a distributed microservices platform

9 Likes

If you were to estimate, how much of the original code you wrote when Monzo was founded do you think is still in production today?

I wrote about 1/3 of the backend code for the first year (split fairly evenly with Matt and Oli). If I have time later, I’ll find out how many lines of code are still in production.

I stopped coding for the most part almost two years ago

I just had a look and discovered that I am still the #12 all time contributor to the Monzo codebase. But it looks like lots of people will pass that mark soon :wink: Here is my contribution history

For comparison, here is a graph of the contributions to our backend repository over the same time

11 Likes

Cats?

Never had a cat or a dog. Dogs appear to be more useful, though

Pineapple on pizza?

Yes

4 Likes