I am working in a team that inherited a big legacy application that sometimes reminds me of Howl’s moving castle from the Miyazaki movie. Similar to the castle, it consists of patched together code from many different technologies (WordPress, PHP, Angular, Vue and React), and like the junked together castle, its page speed is quite slow. While this structure makes for good movies, it does not make for a good application. So, to fix the problem on a fundamental level, a front-end re-architecture strategy was created. …

I have been using Apollo Client for a few years but have never tried it as a local state management tool. I like the approach because of the following:

• If you already use GraphQL and Apollo Client you can avoid having an additional tool for state management like Redux. That reduces the size of your JavaScript bundle and the amount of boilerplate code.
• Using the same approach to querying data whether it comes from the backend or local state.

Recently I decided to give it a try but had little knowledge of how it works and questions like:

• Where exactly…

I’m a junior web developer and I am learning a lot each day. One of the most fundamental things I learned is when you build features, you most probably introduce bugs. Therefore debugging has an important role in the developer’s job.

I would like to share a story about a little but quite annoying bug who lived in our chat web application on iOS Safari browser.

On mobile browser when clicking the submit button, the <textarea> field loses focus by default and the keyboard gets hidden. It’s quite annoying for the chat user to tap on the input field to…

N26 is a mobile bank. All services it provides are digitalised, including our customer support.

The chat on N26 for Web and on the mobile app is one of the most important communication channels. It has always been available for N26 customers, and in October 2018 we launched a chatbot along with the new chat UI.

This article explains the complexity behind building the chat from scratch and our approach on planning and visualising the chat user flow.

When we started to work on it, the task looked quite easy: build the chat UI and implement the logic of sending…

Recently we launched a chatbot along with a new chat UI in N26 for Web.

The chatting behaviour of bot and human differs a lot. This difference is exposed not only in natural language understanding, but in other aspects as well.

We know that there should be a pause between messages to make it easier for the user to read them. This pause is created naturally when another person is typing.

Unfortunately, the chatbot doesn’t need time for typing and send all messages in a row almost at the same time.