Take a look under the hood with the TotallyMoney developers.
Today marks a special occasion: we’ve reached 1000 Pull Requests in our ‘My Account’ code repository. This shows a successful cumulative effort by a cross-functional team of developers, designers, UX and copywriters. We’re taking a moment to congratulate ourselves on 1000 examples of acting collaboratively! Opening a Pull Request (PR) indicates that someone on the …
Data-driven decision making: the reality Data enables us to take risks out of decisions by confirming assumptions, as well as helping us to measure our progress. This data-driven approach has been a core driver of TotallyMoney’s success. However, we hit a few problems: i) One-dimensional reporting feeding into individual excel files. ii) Crude and varied …
Towards the end of 2017, the Marketing Team heard rumours of a new data analytics platform to replace the ‘Viper’ interface, which we built in-house using SQL. Although Viper provided most of the key metrics needed to optimise marketing campaigns and track performance, looking at the data would sometimes raise more questions than the data …
In 2017, TotallyMoney created Borrowing Power to help customers understand how likely they are to get credit. Last week, with the launch of the new ‘Your Offers’ page, we’ve developed that idea into an optimised, personalised experience for all TotallyMoney account customers. Now they can take full advantage of their Borrowing Power. We’ve seen how …
The two prevailing languages at TotallyMoney are JavaScript and C# (.net). A typical product of ours is composed of a JavaScript frontend and a .net backend, with each component packaged separately. However, any single-code repository rarely contains a mixture of languages. We create value for our customers by delivering quality products. The drawback of …
At TotallyMoney, we face a set of challenges that I am certain are not unique to our company. Data is not easily accessible to everyone because our data infrastructure is complex, which means that complex queries have to be written even for the simplest of analyses. Because most people do not have the technical skills …
We recently launched our new free credit report on TotallyMoney and we had to do it in a fairly short time with a small team. To be fair, small, focused teams is the way we prefer to work but it does mean we have to make careful choices about tools and technology in order to …
TotallyMoney’s mission has always been to help customers get a better deal from the credit industry and to build a fairer credit market for consumers. Once the idea to provide our customers with a free credit report was born and then, after all the negotiations, planning and designing were finalised, the task of building it came …
Read moreThe Building Behind Building a Fairer Consumer Credit Market
A look into Elm – a new programming language. What works? What doesn’t? Is it worth using?
The front end stylist position enables more flexibility as they can both create a design and use their development knowledge to see it through to deployment.
Continuing the theme of Microsoft’s recent endeavours to move their entire development stack towards a platform agnostic, more Open Source world, I thought I’d share some of the adventures I’ve had along this bleeding edge of development. Here at TotallyMoney.com, we are happy to have been early adopters of .Net Core, using it to power …
Many of these rules relate to software development, but can be applied more broadly and produce some interesting learnings for business. Occam’s Razor The simplest answer is usually correct. Recognised long before the time of William of Ockham, after whom the rule is named, the learning from this rule is that minimising your assumptions can …
Read more(Some) rules of software development that might apply in the rest of your life
Rust is a systems programming language designed to be safe and fast, both very useful things when writing a production web service. I needed to parse some output from the popular Logentries platform, so I sat down for a few hours and wrote a small service in Rust to fetch and parse the data, and …
Read moreRust: What you need to know about this new systems programming language
We use Jenkins to build production-ready Docker images here at TotallyMoney. The setup works really well, but we encounter regular problems with high disk usage from Docker. This is primarily because old, untagged images aren’t cleaned up either during a new image build or on a timed basis. This is safe of course, particularly for …
Read moreCleaning up Docker images on Jenkins build machines
Here’s a visualisation of the evolution of the TotallyMoney.com loans comparison platform. The video shows the creation of files and changes made to them over time as the application was developed. These changes are recorded via Git, a software version control system, and was visualised using gource. Folders and files are shown as lines …
If I’m honest, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Enterprise Summit in London was a little bit of a sales conference, with Andy Jassy, the Senior VP for Amazon Web Services, talking up the numbers that demonstrate the growth and dominant position of AWS. Not that some of those numbers weren’t impressive – Elastic Compute Cloud …
At TotallyMoney.com, we love helping our customers make good decisions supported by reliable information. When it comes to evaluating our products, and the services we provide, who could be a more reliable source of information than our existing customers? Trustpilot source and publish customer reviews, including comments, and a star rating out of 5. In …