Introduction At REA, we use a set of architectural principles to guide how we build and evolve the systems behind our products. My colleague Shane previously shared these principles in the article Scaling technology with architectural principles. Every year we review these principles, not because we expect them to change every time, but because we want to test them against the environment we’re working in now. This year, that review felt particularly important as AI-assisted development became a more visible part of software delivery. AI-assisted coding has quickly become part of day-to-day…
Android User Interface (UI) testing has a reputation problem. Engineers care about quality but the traditional approach to automated UI testing creates many problems. Tests referring to specific view IDs break when a designer moves a button or a developer refactors a component. Writing one test takes hours. Maintaining a suite of tests becomes someone’s full-time job. When Android Journeys powered by Gemini was announced, most Android teams hadn’t heard of it. It was in a pre-release canary feature drop, not the stable Android Studio channel, and the documentation was sparse. We wanted to…
When I started my journey in platform engineering, I worked on REA’s Internal Developer Platform with the aim of giving engineers a fast, safe and simple way to build, deploy and run applications in production. I thought success meant mastering infrastructure, APIs, scaling and reliability. Of course, these are very important, but mindset is the real differentiator, along with understanding people, simplifying complexity, and building trust at scale. Below are the five lessons I learned from my journey in platform engineering. Lesson one: Be a well-rounded Product Manager (PM) first, platform…
Hello! I’m Hong, a graduate engineer currently working at REA Group. Before joining REA, I completed my Bachelor of Information Technology at Swinburne University of Technology. Since starting at REA, I’ve had the chance to work as both a back end and full-stack engineer, to contribute to real products, and to learn from engineers across two different rotations. In this blog, I’ll walk through a typical day in the office as a tech grad. Every team and project is different, but this should give you a sense of the rhythm, the kind of work you might touch, and what collaboration actually looks…
Early in my career, I was tucked away in a corner doing the kind of support work nobody else wanted to touch. I’d spend days wrestling with tricky issues on my own, with no one to bounce ideas off. After a while, I genuinely started to wonder if I just wasn’t very good at this. What changed everything was a leader who noticed what I was doing, saw more potential in me than I saw in myself, and quietly opened a door. They moved me into a team with strong engineers, gave me work that mattered, and made it clear they believed I could do more. That vote of confidence was all I needed. My…
I studied computer science in university, but I never expected it to be my full-time job. During my second year, I seriously considered pivoting into consulting. However, I’m glad I stayed the course, as it led to immense growth and the discovery of a renewed passion I had never expected. At the start, I had a general feeling of unpreparedness and lack of direction, as I knew nothing about the tech fields out there. Web Development? Sounds fun, but I’m not much of a UI person. Data Engineering? Sounds complicated. Systems Engineering? Wait, what was that again? Basically, there wasn’t a…
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ACCESS TO THIS AREA OF THE WEBSITE MAY BE RESTRICTED UNDER SECURITIES LAWS IN CERTAIN JURISDICTIONS. THIS NOTICE REQUIRES YOU TO CONFIRM CERTAIN MATTERS (INCLUDING THAT YOU ARE NOT RESIDENT IN SUCH A JURISDICTION), BEFORE YOU MAY OBTAIN ACCESS TO THE INFORMATION ON THIS AREA OF THE WEBSITE. THESE MATERIALS ARE NOT DIRECTED AT OR TO BE ACCESSED BY PERSONS RESIDENT IN ANY JURISDICTION WHERE TO DO SO WOULD CONSTITUTE A VIOLATION OF THE RELEVANT LAWS OF THAT JURISDICTION OR WOULD RESULT IN A REQUIREMENT TO COMPLY WITH CONSENT OR OTHER FORMALITY WHICH REA REGARDS AS UNDULY ONEROUS. You are…
ACCESS TO THIS AREA OF THE WEBSITE MAY BE RESTRICTED UNDER SECURITIES LAWS IN CERTAIN JURISDICTIONS. THIS NOTICE REQUIRES YOU TO CONFIRM CERTAIN MATTERS (INCLUDING THAT YOU ARE NOT RESIDENT IN SUCH A JURISDICTION), BEFORE YOU MAY OBTAIN ACCESS TO THE INFORMATION ON THIS AREA OF THE WEBSITE. THESE MATERIALS ARE NOT DIRECTED AT OR TO BE ACCESSED BY PERSONS RESIDENT IN ANY JURISDICTION WHERE TO DO SO WOULD CONSTITUTE A VIOLATION OF THE RELEVANT LAWS OF THAT JURISDICTION OR WOULD RESULT IN A REQUIREMENT TO COMPLY WITH CONSENT OR OTHER FORMALITY WHICH REA REGARDS AS UNDULY ONEROUS. You are…
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