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 need get through to get your …

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 the following way: It fetches the …

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() does what?? A big trap to …

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 production that requires an emergency release. …

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 provocative way to see how they …