My first month at Splitwise

How would I describe my first month at Splitwise? Kick-ass. Absolutely kick-ass. I joined Splitwise as their newest iOS engineer in March, and little did I know I would be in for the time of my life.

My first week, I decided I wanted to pursue a cutting-edge project, and the wonderful thing about working on a small, collaborative team is that I was encouraged to just “go for it!” There is nothing holding you back. When you’ve got an idea, you can just run with it. And let me tell you, I ran. And within a week, the whole team ran the marathon with me.

My idea for the app started out over lunch as an itty-bitty sketch on a napkin. It was a square with some circles and rounded-rect buttons on the inside. But soon we transformed it into a prototype of something very real – an Apple Watch app.

The inspiration for the app was the idea that users can speak to add their expenses. For the first time in Splitwise history, adding an expense is as simple as saying “I paid $20 for groceries.” How cool is that? The app handles both group and friend expenses, and conveniently displays your total balance. We utilized the sentence-parsing API from our quick-add feature that our earliest adopters particularly love.

We started out with this:

And ended up with this:

Pulling off an Apple Watch in a few weeks is a testament to how hard we work at Splitwise, but we also know how to have fun! Also in my first month, we launched Splitwise Dance Edition during our annual April Fool’s Day Hackathon. For product testing, we danced in the office. We danced at a grocery store. And while playing pool.

There’s no shortage of good times at Splitwise, and we’re looking for more engineers to join us! If you want to take the lead on a cutting-edge project and fool-a-thons sound right up your alley, reach out to us at resume.black.hole@splitwise.com.