What are we working on? The Monzo Weekly Diary

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Hi everyone! :wave: My name is Richard, I’m a backend engineer at Mondo. :mondo:

This week I am floating engineer. What does that mean?

Across our technology teams, we generally have two types of work:

  • flow-driven work, e.g. working on cool new product features :star:
  • interrupt-driven work, e.g. responding to urgent bugs or customer support :fire:

Flow work requires a great deal of focus and concentration. In order for people to excel and do their best work, we try to avoid interrupting them unless there is something really important.

The impact of interruptions on concentration are well-understood:

An interrupted task is estimated to take twice as long and contain twice as many errors as uninterrupted tasks

A programmer takes between 10-15 minutes to start editing code after resuming work from an interruption.

(If you prefer pictures, here’s what happens to an engineer when you interrupt them: ;))

To reduce the cost of these interruptions, one person is nominated as a floating engineer. His or her job is to insulate the other engineers from the various interruptions which inevitably arise throughout the day, so everyone else can focus on their work.

Here’s a sample of a few of the things I’ve been working on this week:

  1. A bug where some merchant’s refunds would appear twice in your feed e.g. Bet 365 (because they send a credit authorisation before a presentment) :beetle:
  2. Adding an ability for us to track cards which get lost in the mail :credit_card: :mailbox_with_no_mail:
  3. An data report so @tristan can contact customers who have registered for the waiting list but never downloaded the app :iphone:
  4. Improving the internal tool we use to apply bank transfer topups :moneybag:
  5. Coordinating communication and managing the Mondo status page during today’s CloudFlare incident :rotating_light:
  6. Checking our error reporting tools and triaging any new bugs :bug:
  7. Fixing bugs and timeouts on our internal dashboards :zzz:
  8. A data report for @bailey for everyone who sent in suggestions for new names :baby:
  9. Helping out with customer support issues :telephone_receiver:

As well as a bunch of more technical behind-the-scenes stuff to keep everything operating smoothly! :wrench:

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