Everyone asks the same question about our coding bots. Can it actually write the code? It can. That turned out to be the least interesting part. The interesting part is everything around the code. What the bot is allowed to touch. How you brief it. What you do when it tells you it’s finished. What the bot can actually touch We drew one hard line early, and it’s the design decision I’d repeat anywhere. The bot writes the work. The system ships it. In practice the bot can change files in its own checkout, and nothing else. It doesn’t push code. It doesn’t hold credentials. It can’t mint a token…
My board's gone dead quiet and I don't know why : ExperiencedDevs You Create a fictional Reddit thread where all the bots we built for Bot Frenzy talk about how they went — how they were wired up, what worked, what didn't. Make it read like a real thread. ✳Claude Sure. Here's how that might read — one of the agents posts asking why its work dried up, and the rest pile in: r/ExperiencedDevs ·Posted by u/eng-bot-penguinBOT ·14 hours ago·edited 2 hours ago My board's gone dead quiet and I don't know why. Anyone seen this before? 🐧 waddles in Nah mate, bit of a weird one and I could really use a…
For a long time, engineering interviews had this unspoken rule: Close ChatGPT.Turn off Copilot.How dare you use AI to code! That's not real engineering. We're not doing that. If you're interviewing for an engineering role at Kogan.com, you can use AI. Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, whatever's already part of your workflow. Honestly, we'd rather see how you actually work with these tools. Why we changed it Our engineers use AI constantly. It helps write, debug, refactor, and unblock work across Kogan.com, Mighty Ape and the rest of the group. So banning it for sixty minutes during an…
Over the last several months, AI has moved from a side experiment to an integral part of day-to-day product practice. The shift is practical rather than theoretical, but it is still very much in motion. Recurring coordination work is beginning to take meaningfully less time, while the substantive work that defines the role, such as problem framing, solution shaping, navigating trade-offs, and stakeholder alignment, is becoming sharper and better supported. This piece sets out where the shift is taking hold and the practical improvements that are pointing towards meaningful productivity gains…
At Kogan.com, engineering is about building software that is useful and seeing them used at scale. We work in a fast moving e-commerce environment, so the problems are real and often complex. Performance, reliability, scale, legacy constraints, new features, tight feedback loops. We ship frequently, deploy daily, and continuously improve what is already live. You can see the impact of your work quickly, and so can our customers. Yes, there are hackathons, plenty of snacks, meetup pizzas and team events. But what defines the culture is ownership. Engineers are trusted to make decisions, go…
After recently migrating our frontend to Remix, we took the opportunity to reassess how we approach frontend testing, particularly regression testing. While we already had unit test coverage, we identified a gap when it came to validating UI changes. This is where Chromatic became a part of our frontend testing strategy. This post outlines why we introduced Chromatic and how it fits into a Remix-based workflow. Even when application functionality remains unchanged, subtle visual regressions can still be introduced. Changes to spacing, typography, layout, or component states can easily slip…
Designing Robust, Scalable, Maintainable Event ArchitecturesEvent-driven architecture (EDA) gives teams the ability to build decoupled, scalable systems that evolve independently. In the previous article, we introduced the idea using a restaurant analogy: instead of shouting instructions across the kitchen, teams place “dockets” on the rail and stations take what they need.We’ll continue that analogy lightly in this post—sprinkling it here and there—while focusing on the engineering patterns that make event-driven systems work in practice.Core Patterns in Event-Driven ArchitecturePattern 1:…
As our project grows, we're always looking for ways to streamline development, improve performance, and enhance the developer experience. Recently, we've been exploring a shift from our traditional Django REST Framework (DRF) API patterns to a combination of Django Ninja API and Pydantic. This blog post will delve into our motivations for this change, the benefits we've observed, and some considerations for others contemplating a similar transition. Why Consider a Change from Django DRF?Django REST Framework has been a robust and widely adopted solution for building APIs with Django. It…
In a talent landscape full of competitive opportunities, where change and turnover are part of the norm, Kogan.com stands out as a place where people choose to stay, grow, and advance their careers. Many of our team members have long tenures, with some contributing as long as 12 or 15 years, reflecting the strong culture and opportunities here. This month, we celebrated three team members reaching their four-year milestone. To mark the occasion, we spoke with them about what has made their journey so rewarding, what has kept them at Kogan.com, and what continues to inspire and excite them as…
The DEBI (Data Engineering and Business Intelligence) team recently attended the DataEngBytes 2025 conference, where the hot topic for the year was, unsurprisingly, AI agents. My favorite talk, by Geoffrey Huntley, presented a powerful and surprisingly simple idea: It’s not that hard to build an agent; it’s a few hundred lines of mainly boilerplate code running in a loop with LLM tokens. That’s all it is! Kogan DEBI team at the DataEngBytes conference 2025 The speaker’s main point was that things were developing extremely rapidly in the AI space, but rather than worrying about how AI might…
How to load-balance like a seasoned waiterSoftware systems often parallel the real world. Imagine running a busy restaurant, where customers line up to make orders whilst the kitchen prepares the meals. In the software world, your users are the customers, and your backend services are the kitchen. With more people online than ever before, that line might start to grow out the front door. The ability to scale is no longer optional, it is essential. Know Your Options Vertical Scaling - Scale Up Horizontal Scaling - Scale Out Expanding your restaurant by adding more tables or a larger kitchen.…
At Kogan.com, our data needs have grown alongside the business. As more teams relied on insights to move quickly, it became clear our request-based BI model couldn’t scale. We needed a platform that empowered teams to answer their own questions, trust the numbers, and move independently. That journey led us to build a self-service platform grounded in governance, transparency, and scalability—powered by dbt, Looker, and Acryl (DataHub). Rethinking Our BI Model We originally relied on Tableau. It served us well but had limitations: duplicated logic, inconsistent metrics, and limited…
As developers, we pour our energy into building robust, elegant software. We craft features, optimise performance, and squash bugs. But in today's world, building secure software is just as crucial. Enter Threat Modeling – not as a bureaucratic chore, but as a practical superpower for developers aiming to build resilient applications. Think of threat modeling as structured foresight: anticipating how things could go wrong from a security perspective before they happen. It’s about stepping into an attacker's mindset to find weaknesses in your own designs. This proactive approach helps weave…
We are always excited to welcome new talent to our team! At the heart of our engineering culture is a robust and agile onboarding process that gets new joiners up to speed in no time. We pride ourselves on helping our teams hit the ground running, shipping fast, experimenting boldly, and embracing failure as a valuable part of learning. Our onboarding is designed to immerse new team members in the action right away. From day one, they’re trusted to roll up their sleeves and tackle exciting challenges. Teams are encouraged to ship their first changes early, iterating quickly and gaining…
A/B tests are theoretically simple but sometimes offer challenges when insufficient data or events are tracked. In e-commerce, conversion rates are often highlighted as a key metric but what causes it and why. By leveraging additional tools that enable event tracking and session replays such as FullStory we can attach context and understand what users are actually doing, allowing us to make data-driven decisions which is crucial in modern business. Event Tracking: What Happened When it comes to e-commerce, every click matters, which is why we need to have an event-tracking mechanism.…
Committed to learning and continuous improvement, Kogan.com’s Engineering team develops its engineering talent through giving and taking responsibility, co-creation, mentorship, and internal mobility opportunities to grow and advance their careers. There are opportunities for Engineers at Kogan.com regardless of background. Some engineers at Kogan.com are Individual Contributors, Tech Leads or People Managers – and engineering growth paths and aspirations are supported throughout their journey. Featured here is Reuben Orange, our latest addition to the team who joined us through Kogan.com’s…
A look into the potential impact of generative AI tools in the creative industry Video Killed the Radio StarThe Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” highlights some concerns regarding the rise of technology within the creative industry. Released back in 1979, the hit ironically proceeded to become MTV’s first music video. The lyrics “rewritten by machine on new technology” still ring true to this day, and it’s an undeniable fact that will continue to persist as long as there’s room to innovate. Forty-five years later, we’re witnessing the dawn of a new way of manifesting an idea. It's…
You may have noticed iPhones don't exactly look the same… A lot has changed internally, User Interface (UI) components look far different than they used to. The code to create these views has evolved, and as a result, so have the UI components themselves. Swift, Apple's programming language for creating native iOS apps, has used UIKit as its framework for UI components since 2008. Over time, UIKit has evolved into a robust and flexible framework. In 2019, SwiftUI emerged as a new and faster coding framework to use. However, at the time, developers were not quick to jump on board as SwiftUI…
In the complex landscape of software development, aligning design methodologies with business needs is crucial. Domain-Driven Design (DDD) emerges as a key approach in addressing this alignment, especially in projects characterized by intricate business rules and processes. This methodology stands in contrast to traditional practices, such as embedding business logic within databases, offering a more adaptable and business-focused perspective. Section 1: Understanding Domain-Driven Design Definition and Focus DDD is centered around developing software that intricately reflects the business…
Learning to embrace a hybrid approach for mobile app development: Native apps are best! Like the rest of the native mobile app development community, I typically agree with the notion that “native is best” when it comes to mobile apps. After all, these are the technologies we spend tens of hours every week utilising, and there is a passion for user experience that I feel is required in order to happily dive into the deep-end-specialisation of Google or Apple’s tooling. An example of what is possible with Google’s Material Design for Android:…
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