How annoying is it when @dan5 winds the community up about new features?
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I don’t know, you’d have to ask them 
I’ll check back tomorrow for more questions! 
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What’s the best/ most rewarding project you’ve worked on?
What unusual talents do you have? (practical or not)
What’s the weirdest compliment someone has given you?
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What’s the most arcane problem you have had to track down? Did you manage to fix it?
How is your time split between meetings, reviewing other peoples code and actually getting to do some of your own jobs or things you feel should be worked on.
Who is the True Owner of the Blue Circle?
Do you have teams that are unpaid?
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Of course. This forum is one of them.
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That is tricksy for sure 
How about if custom categories on Plus single account are displayed and act in the same way on the JA but they’re read only, so when the other party presses the category to change the transaction to a custom category a ‘you need Plus’ message is displayed.
This is probably a terrible idea 
What will you do to celebrate your 4th anniversary at Monzo?
Would you prefer to have a hand made out of ham or an armpit that dispenses sun cream?
(The hand grows back if you eat it. The sun cream is enough for your own personal use.)
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Time for some more answers!
Tricky: there are lots of little things I want to fix 
One thing that annoys me is moving money around. A few times I’ve tried to move money from my joint account to my personal account and gone the other way by mistake. I’d love to build “move money from anywhere to anywhere”, with support even for external accounts.
I recall working on a feature for automatically adding “recurring subscriptions” (ie things we predict in committed spending in old Summary) to a tab. Perhaps it’s that? But I don’t remember if it ever shipped!
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When I joined, the “product” side of Monzo (broadly, everyone who works on the app, and app-facing backend APIs) still felt a lot like a startup. The teams changed around a lot to match the needs of the business.
At the time, it all felt quite hectic. But it now means I have experience across most areas of the codebase, which comes in handy a lot!
“Paid” is our internal name for “Monzo Plus and Monzo Premium”. It’s also the name for the team that works on them. Trivia: it was actually called that before we even knew we’d use the names “Plus” and “Premium”.
Things have settled down a lot now, and the teams mostly stay the same. Which means I’ve now been working on Paid for more than half my time here, which is a weird realisation!
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Fingers for toes, easily. Imagine playing the piano with four “hands”!
edit: Could I code twice as fast?!
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For better or worse, I’ve had a blue blob as my avatar for…over a decade, now?? So I’ll leave that one up to you
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The other day a colleague DM’d me to congratulate me on some “top-tier shitposting” on Slack. Dunno if this counts, but it felt pretty good 
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I used to have surprisingly few meetings, and get to spend all my time writing code. Nowadays there are more people working on Paid. So while we still have few scheduled meetings, more of my time is spent reviewing other people’s code and helping them when they get stuck. It’s quite different, although not necessarily in a bad way…although I do still tend to measure my productivity by code written, which is kinda silly
Ooh I don’t know, they were all fun in different ways!
I already hinted at it above but I think Joint Accounts were probably one of my favourite projects: we built the first version in just a few weeks, at a pace that felt super-efficient, and it was something I personally really wanted. And there’s something fun about being the first person to have a joint account card and things like that 
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Hi @tjvr. Monzo (famously) uses microservices in extremis - often favouring a service over even a library call. I’ve worked on a number of microservices architectures and they have been, without exception, absolutely horrific. So, err, a few questions… 
- If services own their own data then don’t you have a lot of problems with (RDBMS-style) joins?
- I understand you use Envoy and a bunch of other microservices infrastructure, but regardless isn’t it just fundamentally much harder to have a network call in between basically any function call in your app? CORBA failed for a reason
- How do you keep the conceptual complexity under control?
Thanks!
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Ooh, good question. We were lucky enough to be living in a 3-bed house from the start of 2020, so we had a dedicated office room, which helped a lot. But it took me a few months to realise that my desk was at totally the wrong height, and I was slowly ruining my wrists 
We’re currently trying to buy a house, where I’m hoping to have enough space for a dedicated work office and a separate desk for gaming and so on. But we have to stay in temporary apartments and AirBnBs while we wait to exchange on the house, so I’m currently carting around a desk, chair and monitor from place to place 
I do find the whole WFH debate really interesting. And it makes deciding where to live extra hard. To go full remote you really need to live far enough out from London that you can afford to have a dedicated office. But that means it’s hard to find an in-between: what if you want to commute in some of the time?
I do feel really bad for my colleagues who’ve been working from dining room tables for the past year. I really do not think I could have coped!
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I’m fairly good at beatboxing, and do it as something of a habit—in the same way some people might hum to themselves.
This has come as a surprise to those of my colleagues who’ve met me in person, and happened to catch me doing this…
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Ooh, requesting a short demonstration next time 
maybe one for the Monzo TikTok? 
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