Mobile Developer Day 2022

Connection and knowledge sharing is important for our mobile developer community. We have regular meetups for the fortnightly mobile guild, coding study groups (Swift dojo, Kotlin dojo) and mobile boot camps. They have been mostly held virtually over the last few years, but we still really do value face to face connection, so we were excited to run an in-person event.

On May 12^th, we brought together our entire mobile developer community for our very first Mobile Developer Day, which took place at our Richmond offices in Melbourne and simultaneously connected to our Xi'an-based China office via Zoom. We wanted to make the most of it, so for this event we decided to maximise the opportunity to be together in person, getting to know each other and focusing on community building.

The day went a little something like this…

Kick Off: Peter Moran

We kicked off with Peter Moran explaining REA's mobile history, detailing the three eras: the iPhone Era 2011-2015, going from zero to several teams and apps; the channel team Era 2016-2018, with re-architecting the app and the "Burger Flip"; the Mobile Platform Era 2018-2022, with mobile development at scale. Bringing us up to date with the Ubiquitous Mobile Era 2022-2024, where every team is a mobile team and mobile development is faster than web!

Panel: old hands and new hands

First up was the "Old hands" panel, where Stewart Gleadow grilled the five longest-serving mobile developers, asking hard hitting questions like "What was your first smart phone?", which became a running theme throughout the day.

Then we had a panel of our newest mobile developer members. We learned about their backgrounds, their first impressions of REA, and of course, what their first smart phone was.

CTO Chris Venter

Chris Venter, our CTO, joined to discuss his history with mobile. It was fascinating to hear how Chris was a part of the team at ANZ building for the very first public iPhone OS SDK (back before it was called iOS).

Breakout sessions

The end of the day saw us break out into five different rooms, tackling different topics such as: careers, learning, work-life balance, team culture and tooling.

The main goal of these breakout sessions was to encourage face-to-face conversations. We can sometimes feel like we work in "Zoom" silos, and we often don't get to meet people from other areas of the business. These sessions were a great success, time just flew past.

"Getting the best out of your career journey" - Michelle Redbourn

The focus for this session was mentoring. It became very apparent that everyone wants to be mentored or be a mentee, but how do you connect with a mentor in the first place? How do we know who the right people are to go to? What different strengths does everyone have? How do we give people the confidence to ask someone for a coffee initially and then to possibly go on to become a mentor? We discussed developing some accessible information within the mobile community as a start.

"Keep learning in an ever-changing mobile landscape" - Olivier Genez

We talked about many things during our breakout session: the challenges we face and tips we have to keep up to date with technology trends; the pressure (self-imposed or not) to "not miss out"; the importance of work/life balance; impostor syndrome; etc. The main take-away for me is that regardless of our experience, we all go through the same dilemmas and face the same challenges, and that's reassuring!

"Work/life balance: Let's not be Darth Vader" - Edward Huynh

Great session. We talked about how WFH has afforded us to have more work/life balance in the form of being about to do some life admin between daily work tasks and admin so that we have more time to enjoy the weekends. Being able to eat better at home and have a routine that promotes a healthier lifestyle. Although it was noted that the commute and walk to work somethings meant you get in more steps during the day than if you WFH and are just walking between the desk and the kitchen.

"Better tooling: make your computer do more of your job for you" - Matt Beshara

Our group discussed a few different topics. Firstly, we talked about all the apps we use to make our everyday experience of mobile development more frictionless, which resulted in us all contributing to a long list of helpful apps we use (Clipy!). We also talked about the ways we use our IDEs and supporting software, and how we can use those tools more effectively by making them do more things in an automated way (e.g. making Proxyman decode Base64 automatically). Finally, we talked about team culture and how we can apply the idea of trying new tools and new processes to not just software, but the teams we work in as well.

Of course, there was plenty of food and laughter throughout the day.

Summary:

All in all, we had a successful and fun day together.

I would like to give a huge thanks to everyone that helped make Mobile Dev Day happen. We hope this is the first of many to come!

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