Vincent Oberle

Pull Requests (PR) are central to most software development organisations these days. Modern source control tools such as Github or Continuous Integration ones like CircleCI have helped a lot making them more accessible. Yet, it seems developers consider PRs mostly as something that you

At TransferWise, we use Kafka for our messaging needs, to communicate between our micro-services and with our legacy Grails monolith. A few days ago, I faced the strangest problem with the Kafka message processing in Grails. The code that consumes Kafka messages works in

So you've got the idea for the next big FinTech company. Since this is about money, you decided to use a serious language, Java. And for representing your currency amounts, BigDecimal seemed like a safe choice. Now time for the small print... BigDecimal.equals(

We don’t know yet how to build the perfect money transfer service, but one thing we know is how to screw up! What’s a screw up at TransferWise? There are plenty of variants. The most obvious one is introducing a bug in

When a company already has a working product and many happy users, it’s usually difficult for outsiders to understand why they are hiring more people. What’s left to do? I often ask such a question to candidates during interviews, in a slightly

There are no testers at TransferWise. Not a single-one. This deliberate choice has been made already a long time ago and I believe it's a key element of our engineering culture: Engineers own the quality of the product. You could actually say we have

In a job, often, you pick two out of those three things: Interesting and challenging work Competitive compensation (like salary and various perks) Fancy job titles The fancy job title is a nice way to compensate for deficiencies in the other areas, especially in

Previously Nilan explained how TransferWise teams are autonomous and trusted. This has some profound effects on what it means to be an engineer here. One of those is there is no real engineer / product manager difference, every engineer is a product person. It’s