Monzonaut AMA - Sophie - Senior Web Engineer Business Banking

[AlanDoe (Alan)]

Happy Monday everyone!

We’re back for another AMA with @sophiekoonin

Sophie has been with Monzo for just over 2 and a half years and is one of our Senior Web Engineers for Business Banking as well as being one of our web discipline leads.

Sophie has a MSc in Computer Science with an undergraduate degree in Linguistics

Get your questions in - will she be the new Monzo Battle Royale Champ?

[bee]

Who is your favourite infrastructure person and why is it me?

What’s the tech stack for https://emojinator.fun/ look like?

[AlanDoe (Alan)]

@N26throwaway

I fixed the typo in the title.

My hero

[Nicbrown]

Hi @sophiekoonin

• What would you say the coolest part of your job is?
• How have you found working from home?
• What do you think Monzo will look like in 5 years’ time?

Thanks!

[MalaiseForever (Ethan)]

How do you go from doing an undergrad degree in Linguistics, to a masters in Computer Science?

[BritishLibrary]

I think I’m going to give up on my usual question as I’ve lost track of who’s in the lead…

[SouthseaOne (Michael)]

I think Bee was wielding Minnie

[Ordog]

Is this dark mode toggle you built and the timing of this AMA confirmation that dark mode will be released very soon and can we have it in the app please because it looks cool

CSS checkbox dark mode toggle

[evangelskies (Eve)]

Hi Sophie!

Interesting switch in specialities! Are there any ways your degree in Linguistics have helped with various aspects of your job?

Do you have any unusual talents?

What is your favourite piece of useless trivia?

[Revels]

Hi. What is your favourite word?

[AlanDoe (Alan)]

What attracted you to Monzo besides the and killer Slack chat?

What’s downtime like for you?

[davidwalton (Award Winning Hot Coral Analyst)]

How much time do you spend ‘communicating’ in the #yelling channel?

Be honest.

[nicolam (Nicola F)]

What’s your favourite memory from your time working at Monzo?

Also, your make up is always fire What’s your next look going to be for hosting the All Hands?

[AlanDoe (Alan)]

Today is the final day to get questions in for @sophiekoonin

[sophiekoonin]

Hey everyone! Wow, lots of questions. I’ll try and get through them all!

[sophiekoonin]

@bee

Who is your favourite infrastructure person and why is it me?

What’s the tech stack for https://emojinator.fun/ look like?

You know I love you all equally. You’re a magical team of magical people.

Emojinator is entirely client-side JavaScript - I decided if people were going to be making lots of emoji, I wasn’t going to pay for the computing time so the magic all happens in your browser!

The site itself is built with Hugo, a Go-based static site generator. To do the emoji, I mostly use the Canvas API and a couple of useful libraries for image manipulation (Konva.js) - you can see the source code in its full glory on GitHub.

[danbeddows (Dan)]

Hey @sophiekoonin

Other than React, what are some of your favourite packages? (that you regularly use with or without React)

Do you still regularly use Redux or do you get by on React’s own hooks?

How many web engineers does Monzo employ nowadays?

Finally, I know Monzo has dedicated iOS and Android devs, but do you ever see Monzo going a hybrid route using something like React Native that Coinbase recently pulled off?

Edit: also sneaky last question sorryyyy - is Monzo using typescript or javascript? or a mix?

Thanks and have a great Friday!

[Minnie]

What’s one thing about your job that you wish everyone knew?

[Sarah-Bee (Sarah B)]

We know you love Product Testers, who is your favourite ?

[sophiekoonin]

@N26throwaway

Three questions for now.

1. Is the browser banking for business customers something Monzo are going to bring to personal customers too? Is that something you’ve explored or are working on?
2. If you could improve one aspect of Monzo, what would it be, and why?
3. Given your degree in linguistics, what are your personal thoughts and opinions on the word frauded ?

If something bad happened to the money in your bank account, such as it being taken without your consent, or you were tricked into making payments you wouldn’t otherwise have made, would it be best, or clearest, to say: poll Read on for context…

4. Who would win at Scrabble, you or @Dan5?

1. I would love to bring it to personal customers, but it’s not on our roadmap just yet as far as I’m aware. Lots of other exciting stuff going on across the business. In the meantime we’re focussing on making it a great experience for our business customers!

2. I’d love our web engineering team to be bigger so we can work on even more cool stuff. (of course I’d say that). We’ve been hiring recently, though, so hoping to expand the team in not too long!

3. It’s a funny one, I was thinking about this. As linguists we’re taught to be descriptivist, not prescriptivist - that is, it’s not our place to say what is right or wrong, we should simply observe how language is used. The rules of language were basically decided by some 18th century grammarians who decided to impose some rules based on what they thought was “correct”, which led to a lot of regional/social language features being labelled as ‘incorrect’ or ‘bad’.
   My general rule is: if people understand what you’re trying to say, then your language is fine, and nobody should tell you otherwise.

I think here the goal is to convey “your card has been used for fraudulent purposes” in a short a way as possible. “Defrauded” isn’t quite right here, as you don’t defraud a card - you defraud a person or company. I think it was pretty funny of us to basically make up a word here, but you can tell what it means, right?? So it’s doing its job

Also I trust our writing team implicitly - they’re fantastic.

4. I’m horribly rusty at Scrabble, so probably @Dan5. I’m a Bananagrams girl myself.