We know you love Product Testers, who is your favourite ? 
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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!
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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!
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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.
- I’m horribly rusty at Scrabble, so probably @Dan5. I’m a Bananagrams girl myself.
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Without a doubt the fact that I have the autonomy and influence to make changes in the engineering org. In the past I’ve worked places where they say “we’re relying on you to bring change!” and then you try and do it, and you get told “nope, can’t do that.” At Monzo, I designed and introduced new coding standards for our internal APIs across the organisation, and was met with nothing but encouragement.
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I used to go into the office every day because I love to be around people, but the transition was honestly super smooth. I’ve loved having the commute time back. Our TechOps team are second-to-none and the way they’d streamlined all comms + onboarding meant we didn’t really experience any issues going remote. Everything’s done via Slack/Meet anyway.
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Flying cars and jetpacks, and playing among the big leagues as one of the UK’s biggest banks. (With web banking, hopefully!)
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Fingers for toes, because then I can shove them in Doc Martens and nobody will know.
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I was privileged to grew up with computers, and was glued to mine for most of my childhood. I used to build websites as a teenager. Never considered software development as a career, though (wanted to be a doctor for a long time until I realised I would never pass A level chemistry!). After graduation I tried a few different options and, during a quiet period, did the CS50X course on edX because I thought it looked interesting. Realised that I loved coding, and I was good at it. Before I knew it I’d enrolled on the MSc Computer Science course at Birkbeck, which is designed for people like me who don’t come from a maths/CS backgrounds.
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Haha, no sadly not! I was playing with dark mode toggles for my own site. I don’t know anything about dark mode plans, sorry!
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There’s a surprising amount of crossover with Linguistics and CS. For one thing, I learnt formal logic in Linguistics, which has a place in the study of CS. There was also a lot of syntactic analysis (studying the order of words in sentence, and the functions of each of those words), which came in handy when I was building a compiler in my masters - lots of identifying parts of language and seeing what should come next!
Unusual talents… not sure I have anything particularly unusual, I’m a singer (I used to run the Monzo choir, Hot Choral, until the pandemic hit) and I like to arrange music. I can pick stuff up with my toes, is that a talent?
As for favourite piece of useless trivia: In German music notation, the note we call a B is known as “H”. The composer Bach used to encode his name into his compositions using the notes Bb, A, C and B natural (or B A C H in German notation) - known as the “Bach motif”. It’s basically the Baroque equivalent of Jason Derulo singing “Jason Derulo”. It’s called a musical cryptogram!
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Sesquipedalian. It means “using long words”.
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The thing that attracted me originally and made me apply was the fact that Monzo was listed on the Codebar sponsors page. I was very active in the JS community pre-pandemic, and knew I wanted to work somewhere that hosted meetups like Codebar (my previous company didn’t). So I looked down the sponsors page, and there was Monzo! I was already a customer and liked the product, so I thought why not see what happens.
Downtime pre-pandemic was going to choir, going to meetups, eating at restaurants (I love food), making music/arranging songs. Downtime during-pandemic is mostly playing video games - most recently I’m playing Cyberpunk 2077 on the PS5. How bad can it be, I thought. The storyline is amazing, the game has so much potential, but it’s a shockingly poor experience. I feel so bad for the developers.
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I’m… not in that channel 
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Some highlights…
- launching Business Banking (though it was just when lockdown hit, so we had to do it remotely!)
- visiting the old Cardiff office with a few pals from Ops Product
- presenting the All Hands around the time of the 30th anniversary of the web, and getting people to share their internet memories (such nostalgia)
Thank you - and ahh I don’t know! I bought the Urban Decay ultraviolet palette on Black Friday and have used it like once, so maybe that…
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This is excellent, excellent punning.
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We use Next.js for a lot of our web apps, and I think it’s brilliant. It makes server-side and static rendering a breeze
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Some of our systems do still use redux, we have migrated a lot of it over to GraphQL. We don’t use Redux in Monzo Business for Web.
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We have around 8 full-time web engineers I think, though we are in the process of hiring more!
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I don’t see us going to React Native any time soon. I think it’d be a gargantuan effort to rebuild our apps, and we have some incredibly talented native app developers!
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We use JS and Flow, but are in the process of migrating to Typescript!
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We can’t just build stuff - things need to be prioritised among all the other work we’ve got on, we need to make sure we’re not dropping anything else by picking something new up. We’re also a highly regulated company, so we need to make sure what we’re doing is safe and compliant. A new feature may need design input, needs to actually be built, needs testing, etc. A lot of the time we get feedback like “why can’t you build X, it shouldn’t take very long” but… it’s probably on a list somewhere, it always takes longer than you think, and we have a lot of other stuff to get round to first!
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Now’s a good time to point out that it’s not up to me 
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And these exciting things are?
I’m not giving up trying to find out yet
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thanks, the pun came first then I had to start the choir
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You know I love you lots.
I also work directly with our product tester Craig who often makes me laugh so hard I cry. He messaged me once to tell me that he was annoyed I was on holiday because he wanted to talk about #FreeBritney. He also said that if he won the lottery, he’d buy a house that had a corridor that looks like it’s really long, but actually just gets smaller as it goes back.
That said, all of our product testers are an absolute joy, super thorough and talented, and never fail to amaze me at what they come up with!
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