What makes you smile about Monzo? šŸ˜Š

So I just heard a really awesome story from my Grandad that I thought Iā€™d share :blush::monzo:

Yesterday in the pub he was queuing up with some friends and spotted that the girl in front was paying with a Monzo card - My grandad, being a brand new Monzo user, said ā€œHey, Iā€™ve got one of those too!ā€ :smiley: - at which point he was dragged over (not literally) to the girlā€™s parents :joy:

It sounded like she was a very passionate Monzonaught desperately trying to convince her parents that Monzo was amazing (I know the struggle :sweat_smile:, Iā€™m 50% of the way there). She pointed out to her dad that even my grandad had a Monzo card and that he should ā€œget with the timesā€ :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: Really awesome to see that the Monzo hype is still alive and well!

I know itā€™s silly but it put a smile on my face :yum: Just shows how powerful a Hot Coral card can be in public! No other banking card in the world EVER seeā€™s that kind of attention or reaction :hot_coral_heart: I love that Monzo is something that real people are excited about - I know I am.

Think about it, Monzo is a bank :stuck_out_tongue: Whatā€™s fun about banking?! Normally nothingā€¦ Thatā€™s not the case with Monzo :mondo:


Does anybody else have similar stories about Monzo? :grin:

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For me itā€™s just the fact that Monzo is a human company instead of a big evil corporate machine.

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I love the way that itā€™s friendly and user-focused. Everything about Monzo says ā€˜communityā€™ and I genuinely donā€™t know another bank that I could say that about. I donā€™t think other banks genuinely take into consideration what their customers wantā€¦and if they do, it usually takes people to complain, whereas Monzo go out to the community and ask before theyā€™re told.

When I see someone else whip out a Monzo card itā€™s always a little nod of acknowledgement that ā€˜hey I use monzo tooā€™. Itā€™s also a great conversation starter as youā€™ve highlighted perfectly

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For me, it would have to be this Twitter storm. Itā€™s great on so many levels, and I wonder how many people have switched to Monzo as a result. Would love to see another bank try and do this!

Check out @eileentsoā€™s Tweet: https://twitter.com/eileentso/status/1065641589165436933?s=09

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Time to revive this thread! :hot_coral_heart: Monzo did something amazing! And it wouldā€™t have been possible without the incredible community over on Slack :blush: (not knocking this part of the equally amazing community :wink:)

A little over a month ago, I noticed an issue with PDF statement generation inside the appā€¦ :thinking: There wasnā€™t a burning need to generate one but I was curious about a comment somebody had made in another thread about their statementā€™s balance not including ā€˜somethingā€™ (a savings pot iirc), anyway! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

A day went by and I decided to ping a (non-urgent) message to Monzoā€™s delightful COps and within a couple of hours I received an apologetic reply with a nice person trying to help figure this out for me :blush: Now, me being me, Iā€™d already tried loads of troubleshooting steps (rebooting, re-installing Monzo, re-flashing the latest OS update for my phone, going back to a stock kernel, using different PDF viewers, etc. I tried to leave no stone unturned :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:). But sadly nothing had worked for me :eyes: so I (wrongly) assumed that it must be something on Monzoā€™s end.

Half a dozen messages later and we were no closer to solving the mystery. It was getting pretty late and my case had been escalated to a more senior member of the team for review the following day :innocent: I heard back the next afternoon and on their end everything was perfect! No errors, no bad return codes from my account and every device they tried (including a Pixel 3XL, same as me) worked. :thinking: I think it was fair to say that we were all scratching our heads that this stage :joy: Some more investigating was done and in the meantime I was sent a copy of my statement which Monzo had kindly generated for me :tada:


Because Monzo knew that everything was fine on their end, I went back to troubleshooting on my end :slight_smile: it took a day but I was able to pinch another phone from somebody and tried the PDF statement generationā€¦ :open_mouth: IT WORKED! :boom:

This of course puts my device in the firing line :fire: what could possibly be the problem?! A flagship device running the latest software, using the same Monzo app & the same PDF viewer - yet all I could see was 2 blank pages on a PDF :scream:

There was nothing we could do, it had been narrowed down to ā€˜somethingā€™ on my phone but nobody had any idea what.

At this stage I thought Iā€™d expand my search for an answer :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: so I hit up the Android channel on Slack and there were no reports of a similar issue :sweat_smile: @daniel.cannon the joined in on the fun but also no luck figuring it out (this was in the days leading up to Christmas so not the best timing :christmas_tree:) nevertheless the issue was still being investigated :hot_coral_heart:

(During this, I found that I couldnā€™t access my Statement History eitherā€¦ Only the statement section of my Summary :grimacing: Daniel got that fixed as quick as a flash though :boom:)
However the statement generation itself wasnā€™t working for me :yum:

Christmas went by and @joecarter (I hope thatā€™s tagged the right Joe :joy:) suggested a logcat to capture any errors (there was nothing obvious in the logs) the interesting part came from the logs Joe shared moments after! :eyes:

01-03 20:40:40.095 27182 27182 I chromium: [INFO:CONSOLE(0)] "Using unescaped '#' characters in a data URI body is deprecated and will be removed in M71, around December 2018. Please use '%23' instead. See https://www.chromestatus.com/features/5656049583390720 for more details.", source: (0)

We had caught the smoking gun! :smoking::gun::tada:


I then facepalmed quite hard :man_facepalming::sweat_smile::see_no_evil: ā€¦ It was my fault all along!! I love to live on the bleeding edge of all hardware & software (and when you play with fire youā€™re bound to get burned! :fire:) I was using Chrome Canary as my WebView client :expressionless: (a very unstable nightly release of Chrome) - turns out that Monzo passes the raw PDF data to Chrome for it to process & render it! And a feature which was depreciated as of Chrome 71 means that version 73 (which I was running) just breaks!

I flicked back to Chrome Stable and what do you know? It worked :wink:


If you stop reading here itā€™ll look like I just wasted lots of time for Monzo :sweat_smile::innocent:

image

If all PDF creation was going to break with Chrome version 72 :grimacing: (which is coming at the end of January!!) then 1.4 million customers would be banging at Monzoā€™s proverbial door wondering why their app doesnā€™t work :grimacing:

So I let the COp in on the brilliant news and gave a bit of detail on why and the case was closed :blush:

@daniel.cannon was on the case :sunglasses: A few tweaks here and there to try and replace the depreciated mechanism but no luck :stuck_out_tongue: It wasnā€™t until I tested on Chrome 72 that the full extent of the issue was revealed (we hadnā€™t tested 72 at the time, just 71 & 73)ā€¦ In a few weeks this issue would crop up for everybody.

Then today I got a message saying the issue was fixed and the patch should roll out today or tomorrow! Moments later Dan Hughes (couldnā€™t find an @!) said it was in the wild :eyes: and it was indeed! I tested it out straight away and yippee it was working :hot_coral_heart:


So this (bloody long!!) post is just my way of saying thanks to Monzo for being so open to the community, accepting bug reports and being more proactive than Iā€™ve ever seen a company be :blush: It was really fun helping out and Iā€™m glad this issue was caught well in advance of it becoming a widespread issue :blush:

Keep up the fantastic work! :smiley:

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You are an absolute gem for helping us out with that one @nexusmaniac - we may never have caught that without you until it was already affecting people! :grinning: Great stuff.

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Seems like heā€™d be a good fit in the team!

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Does he get a golden ticket to a job interview at Monzo ?! He definitely deserves it and is a little gem in the making for you !!

Awesome dedication @nexusmaniac

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Iā€™m not even going to be subtle about this. It was a major mistake not giving Marcus a job, his blood is Hot Coral

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But think about it this way, whoā€™s gonna spy for us if our best agent defects?! :male_detective::monzopride:

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Never heard of having a mole in the company? He could be a double agent

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I thought we agreed not to mention that on here. Or is operation Marzo an elaborate triple bluff?

(Also has Agent Zero checked in yet? Theyā€™re overdue :thinking:)

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:blush::blush:

Thanks everybody for all those messages!! Iā€™ve got a smile I canā€™t wipe off my face now :joy::hot_coral_heart: Since when did the internet become a kind place?! :wink:

Who knows what the future holds? It definitely stings not getting a job with the wonderful folks at Monzo but I have no intention of giving up on in! People may have experience on paper but nobody else has such a hot coral CV :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

(I need to use links to forum posts instead of a CV in future :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: recruitment need to be introduced to Nexusmaniac, not Marcus! :hot_coral_heart:)

I see what you did there :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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What a lovely write-up! Iā€™ve made this account just to give you a big thank you and internet high five :hot_coral_heart: Great talking to you today!

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Such a wholesome read! :blush:

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Wait, we didnā€™t hire you? :interrobang:

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Thank you! :blush:

Amazing!! :hot_coral_heart: High five received haha :raised_hands:

(I guess thatā€™s why I couldnā€™t @ you :joy:)

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Sadly not :see_no_evil::sweat_smile: Thereā€™s always next time though (I hope! :innocent:) :crossed_fingers:

I thought Iā€™d nailed the application but I guess I didnā€™t stack up to the other applicants this time around :pensive:

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You canā€™t have him. Heā€™s ours. Get a Patron started!

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No point being subtle. Itā€™s time Marcus got a job at Monzo. I donā€™t know what the employment requirements are, but if Marcus ainā€™t it, I donā€™t know what is.

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