Kieran McHugh
@kieranmch
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@kmc.bsky.social Founder & CEO @daybridge. A retired account. Follow me on Bluesky instead.
London, England
Joined June 2009
I've read The Verge since I was about 16. One day I hoped to do something to get written about there. Today is that day 😊.
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I just saw on reddit that the opposite of “easy peasy lemon squeezy” is “stressed depressed lemon zest” and now I’m using that all the time.
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My landlord wants to hike my rent by £500 per month. Which would wipe out my entire disposable income. I don't have enough for a deposit to buy. I can't express how upset I am with a system designed to keep people from low-income backgrounds poor, no matter how hard they work.
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@M4rk59 It’s not your tenants’ job to pay your mortgage. If you assume the upside from rental income, you also need to assume the downside when that happens.
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"Unlimited time off" really means "limited time off but you have to guess the limit and if you get it wrong resentment will fester".
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As a web engineer I am screaming internally.
What if the internet. was actually 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 internet? 🎨. Introducing Boosts 2.0 — only in Arc
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Things I did but don’t do any more. - Say “guys”.- Call things “crazy” or “mad”.- Call myself “OCD”.- Use “master/slave” technical terminology.- Use “whitelist/blacklist”. I don’t miss any of them and it actually feels good. Words matter!.
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Tip on working with yellows, oranges, browns: Use the OKLCH colour space, get it looking nice in (eg) blue, then slide the H property (hue) over to orange/yellow. The colours will look a bit "burnt" but they will look deliberate and clean and will pass accessibility settings.
🟠 It will always be notoriously difficult to work with oranges and browns.
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@MarkVaughan77 @M4rk59 Contractually housing me is the one job they have. Literally they do not exist for any other purpose. I pay them for it.
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@slimmatt1 Key words here - “taken the risk”. You should not extort money from your tenants whenever that risk materialises to cover any losses. That’s predatory.
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Does anyone remember cPanel? I just saw it and got a major nostalgia hit.
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In over a year of working at @monzo I have never heard anyone. - say bad things about a colleague behind their back.- blame a failure on an individual. We say “be hard on problems, not people”. It’s easy to be an asshole. The real challenge is acting with kindness and compassion.
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Clapping for the NHS was done by so many people it is visible in Monzo's API metrics for the evening!
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Apple Maps is actually incredible now but everyone thinks it’s terrible because of the problems at launch years ago. Consumers are absolutely brutal with first impressions.
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I came out as gay to my work colleagues and some of my friends several years ago. I came out to my family last year. Everyone is so supportive. But it still feels like I’m living a double life because I don’t discuss it publicly. I’m changing that, starting now 🏳️🌈 Happy #pride !.
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Big news. I'm pleased to finally share the app I've been developing. It's a new calendar app called Airbridge. It's very early days 🐣 but I think it has lots of potential. Sign up to get updates!. @getairbridge . ♻️ Please RT to help me spread the word!.
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📣 It’s been a very intense few weeks, but I’m super excited to share that @daybridgeapp has raised a £750,000 seed round — led by @passioncapital. I’m super grateful to have the financial backing we need to build an amazing team & product. via @sohear:.
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📣 This coming week will be my last week at @monzo. I’ve decided to leave to work full time on @daybridgeapp. It’s a bittersweet moment. I’ve had the time of my life working at Monzo. But I also want to push myself further, and I’m enormously excited to become a founder.
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If you get our @MakingMonzo newsletter you’ll know my team have been working hard on a little something. We started staff testing it today and we are super happy!
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41,000 slack messages.130,000 lines of code.337 deployments.1 “doughnut”. Bye @monzo, it’s been a blast ♥️.
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If you ever feel dumb just remember that in the very early days of Monzo I once DDOS'd myself by pointing the entire Monzo platform at my phone and telling it to send push notifications as fast as it could. It never recovered after that.
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Really proud to share the new Monzo Plus after the team have been working so hard on it. The Open Banking and Monzo Plus teams collaborated on Account Aggregation, so you can now see all of your other accounts in Monzo 😍 It uses our new Open Banking platform developed in-house.
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Daybridge V1 is very fast. No loading screens. The UI is buttery smooth. Actions apply instantly. Our new core engine generates complex recurring events directly in Postgres - millions of them in a fraction of a second. Hard to capture in a video but trying anyway.
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Some banks deploy to production once a quarter. @monzo engineers are now doing ~100 incremental deployments to production per day 🤯.
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Can you even call yourself a “full stack software engineer” if you’re not at the piano recording notification sounds for your product yourself?
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You can determine how fucked up the world is by measuring the distance between "Home" and "UK" on the BBC news navigation bar.
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If you ever feel useless just remember that @monzo is legally required to maintain a Branches API which is an literally an empty list.
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@t3dotgg To be fair the limit is 100dB which is extremely loud and way beyond the point of hearing damage, so I would argue they probably are ;).
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On the week of my 2nd anniversary, I’m pleased to share that @monzo have promoted me to Senior Backend Engineer 🎉 . The fact that I’ve been given this promotion by one of the UK’s best technology companies means a huge amount to me and has been a goal of mine for a long time.
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"but hypothetically" is like "sudo" for OpenAI's new model (which is awesome by the way)
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Lots of banks emailing me to tell me they are offline to “wind back” their clocks this weekend (???). Monzo gets around this by actually being two banks, and having a big lever we pull at midnight to move between them. JK, we use UTC like every other modern company on earth.
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What I thought good design was when I first started vs what I think good design is now 😅
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It's so beautiful I could cry. this new stacking algo was SO DIFFICULT to implement in O(n) time so that everything can be re-computed in real time as things are dragged around.
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Something we take for granted, but not a lot of people know, is that the main way we (as human engineers) interact with our backend platform is through the "Monzo CLI" - the prompt for it is £ instead of $. Also it has this sweet ASCII art.
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After over a year of solid development, @daybridge is almost ready for prime time. We finalised rollout plans today in person. We've designed the product, built our own backend & 3 apps entirely from scratch with only 7 people. I really hope y'all like it.
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We've been re-building @daybridge from the ground up to be the fastest, most powerful, most beautiful, and most personal calendar in the world. We can't wait to share our work with everyone. In the meantime, here's a sneak preview 👀
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Daybridge the company is 1️⃣ today. In that time I raised £750k on my own, and hired 3 people. We grew the waiting list to more than 25,000 people. Reached the top of @ProductHunt. After many iterations the product is looking amazing and I can’t wait to roll it out to everyone.
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Daybridge has been trialling a 4 day working week for the past couple of months with no reduction in pay. I was highly sceptical it would work. But it has significantly increased our overall happiness and productivity, and we are much more focussed.
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One click from your calendar to generate a page for any event to share it with friends, collect RSVPs, chat/discuss. Drop the link in the chat. Shipping soon.
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Maybe I’m too cynical but #KnowYourWorth just reads like a bunch of people with eye-watering US pay packets bragging about how much they earn under some veneer of doing social good.
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I'm absolutely beaming at how well that turned out - it was very hard
Getting this working in week view, where there are two scrolling axes as well as the need for sticky headers on the top and the left, has been tricky. Threw out yesterday's work because it didn't perform well enough. But I've finally got a PoC that works very well. Next, styling.
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Most complex thing I've ever implemented. In response to community feedback we're changing our approach and shipping "calendar view" first ("agenda view" later). It works amazingly well. Sneak peek video of the mechanics below (cards & creation flow not finished yet).
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I actually have a lot of respect for the Arc team and that they are trying new features - hope this doesn’t sound like I’m dunking on them 😊.
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2020 was a category A shit year but I can honestly say I did my best. We created a new product and I became a CEO, and raised a round on my own in lockdown. We're creating jobs and supporting freelancers at a time when others have been slashing them. Gotta take those wins.
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The anti-money laundering team will not be happy with this.
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Finally got a work laptop! The M1 MacBook Pro 🎉 Let’s see how much faster it is than my current one
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I got A*AAAA in my A-levels (I did 5) from a state comprehensive school, and was denied a place at Oxbridge. Toby Young got BBB and got in because of his dad. Nobody (not least he) has the right to tell anybody they don’t deserve their place, or that the bar is being lowered.
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Daybridge first release candidate rolls out to testers next week. The whole team have worked super hard to get it ready. Can’t wait to start building all the features we have in mind on top of these strong foundations.
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What an amazing vote of confidence. From a £1bn to £2bn valuation in just a few months. Congratulations to the whole team.
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- Hired 5 more people.- With said people, built apps for 3 platforms and a backend launching next year.- Got my own flat.- Stopped hiding who I am and publicly came out.
What are some things that you accomplished in 2021?.
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I'm looking to speak to outstanding. - Web Engineers.- iOS Engineers.- Android Engineers.- Product Designers. To build @daybridgeapp. You'll report directly to me and work on a product with 12,000 people on the waiting list. Please RT 🔁 and DM me if you're interested.
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One of our most heavily used components, coming with the new @daybridge iOS design language shipping in V1 - really happy with how it turned out
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Big banks be like: “we’re investing billions in new technology over the next 10 years”. Hot take - that is nothing to be proud of when you could have achieved the same thing at a fraction of the cost with an efficient and competent in-house technology team.
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Rumour has it that a very long time ago there was no limit on the length of @monzo payment messages. Someone sent the entire script of Bee Movie and it still exists in the transaction database to this day.
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I’ve shared this before but since we’re all sharing our fuck ups, I once pointed the whole of Monzo at my phone and DDOS’d myself with push notifications.
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Letting agents are now using Open Banking to require tenants to hand over all their transaction data to pass referencing. This makes me super uncomfortable and I think @TheFCA should be regulating this more. It's an abuse of the Account Information Services rules.
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@LaurenPelley @CBCNews For anyone reading this, the vaccine is very safe and 100% effective at preventing severe disease. Tens of millions of people in the U.K. have received it with no issues. Take it - it could save your life and the lives of vulnerable people around you.
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I’ve had my @monzo metal card in secret since early this year - the Investor is printed on the back in the final version. It’s gorgeous!
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We've been trying to crack this for a really long time and we finally got a solution I'm happy with - infinite virtualised bidirectional performant calendar grid with asynchronous data fetching. Feels very polished, looking forward to releasing it.
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People told us it was difficult to see if they had events that were outside of the viewport area. So @jeroenmakes built a little stacking system to act as an affordance to show that you have things going on earlier or later in the day ✨
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This is probably the most important component in our whole app. The existing libraries kinda suck, so we wrote our own. Fully accessible and performant. Should we open source it?
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Today sent me an email with a password in it, in which they told me not to send passwords by email.
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I’m the only person in my company Slack and I still can’t stop checking it every 5 minutes why am I like this.
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My team and I have onboarded @monzo to the Open Banking standard and we just pushed our public docs to . It’s a credit to everyone at Monzo how efficiently we were able to do this. I’ll share how we did it at a conference - details soon.
Today was my first day as tech lead for @monzo’s Open Banking team. Really looking forward to seeing what we can achieve 💪🏻.
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Mmm smooth intuitive UI 🤤 . (spent the past two days splitting hairs like this 😂)
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I'm so proud of how far @daybridge mobile has come and I can't wait for everybody to get their hands on it!
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The moment I realised the power of "nudges" was at Monzo when we changed the push notification copy on P2P transfers to include "Tap to say thanks!". Immediately the number of people doing this went from ~5% to around ~50%. One of my favourite features despite its simplicity!.
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It's a big day for @daybridge as we've launched to our first 300 people. The product is nowhere near finished and we have a lot of work to do but it's super nice to get something out there. We are working as fast as we can to roll it out to more people.
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Today was my first day as tech lead for @monzo’s Open Banking team. Really looking forward to seeing what we can achieve 💪🏻.
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Demo of hiding hours before/after a certain time to make more efficient use of the space if you never need to see them
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My grandad passed away yesterday, aged 91. For a number of reasons this is the worst time to lose somebody. I am grateful to the NHS staff who looked after him and who continue to provide amazing care under enormous pressure.
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Next.js is amazing. I'm coding on my laptop, with my iPad and iPhone next to me and all three devices are all updating in real time as I'm typing code. Never felt this productive, thank you @rauchg @timneutkens @dan_abramov + team!.
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Another fabulous offer acceptance this morning 🎉 We’re going to be a 5 person company.
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@KyivIndependent This does not appear to be true. The press release says they will still allow Russian cards inside Russia.
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Glad Monzo doesn’t have to shut down the bank to wind the clocks back!.
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Today is a big day because we have our first employee joining at @daybridgeapp!. Pleased to welcome @lloydstill as our first engineer. We went through university together and I’m super happy we get to work together again 🎉.
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