The biggest things we learned at Hey! All Day 2024

Earlier this month, some of the team headed to sunny Leeds to check out what’s new in the world of the web at Hey! All Day 2024.

As big fans of the conference, this wasn’t our first rodeo. And as usual, we came away with a tonne of useful insights. Here’s a round-up of our top talks of the day.

Sophie’s talk was all about technical migrations and, more specifically, how Monzo migrated their codebase from Flow to Typescript.

Basically, we’ve all migrated projects from one platform to another. Users change apps, designers migrate their projects to different designing software—and we’ve seen a huge transition from Adobe XD to Figma over the past half-decade. Developers also have a wide array of CMSs, JS libraries, CLI’s and apps to mix and match on a whim. We’ve also got the migrations that happen because it’s the latest trend—something that’s not necessarily safe for a lot of projects.

During the 45 minutes, Sophie delved into the challenges her team faced while migrating over to Typescript, explaining that what initially seemed to be a manageable process quickly exploded into a mammoth task. One example was having to account for different obstacles when the timeline increased due to the complexity of the migration. It was interesting to hear how the team replaced large libraries with a lot of dependencies; taking on the top-level ones first, and then trickling down the code changes into the smaller ones until eventually the entire stack could be replaced.

And when it comes to migrations, it definitely got us thinking about what’s considered “boring” and “safe”.

Ana’s talk was up there with the most interactive. She started by explaining her love for the Finnish rock band, the Rasmus, and how it’s her go-to karaoke choice. She then explained how she leverages the Web Speech Javascript API to create a karaoke machine in her browser and adds additional functionality to identify mispronounced or skipped words.

How it came together was really interesting to see, and gave some insight into the more whimsical nature of the web—something that can be near impossible to get into a real-world project. Using this technology had sparse browser support, but she showed that experimenting on the bleeding edge, with functionalities that aren’t supported, can be a welcome addition to a skillset.

Ana also gave a live demo of the karaoke machine being used. And turns out she’d included an easter egg: her talk featured certain words that were in fact song titles—so she used the API to look up and provide more information on those songs at the end.

And that—is the kind of nerdiness we’re here for.

In this talk, the Monzo team explained the intricate realities of innovating within the fintech space. They took us through the highs, the lows and the unforeseen moments of both dread and joy—as well as their internal product strategy and development approach.

We saw how all of this came together to create Monzo’s payment experience—one that seamlessly blends accessibility, safety, intelligence, and fun. But more importantly, we learned how to:

1. Embrace reality—because innovating in a high-regulated fintech environment means dealing with the challenges that come along with it.
2. Navigate turbulence—and by that, we mean how to keep our cool when facing the twists and turns of product strategy and development.
3. Focus on vision—in other words, how to stay anchored to the broader vision, even when dealing with distractions or setbacks.
4. Innovate with users in mind—crafting solutions that prioritise accessibility, security, intelligence, and enjoyment.
5. Celebrate the journey—our favourite one of all: how to simply embrace the innovation process and challenges we encounter along the way.