Life at REA Group - Lessons from 7 years of DevOps

From hiring the right people to running distributed teams.

Abstract

REA Group is the parent company of one of the most popular Australian websites - realestate.com.au.

Over the past 7 years REA Group has scaled from a 30 odd IT workforce to 200 across multiple locations.

From Waterfall to Agile. From archaic to an employer of choice.

Over my 7 years at REA we have lessons which I’d love to share on

• Hiring Operations and Developers
• Getting Operations and Developers to collaborate
• Optimising teams to be more effective
• Overcoming cultural differences in a distributed team - particularly Asian and Western cultures
• How to knowledge share technical information across the entire company

Speaker

Trent Hornibrook, Delivery Lead at REA

Bio

In Australia, one of the most trafficked Australian websites is realestate.com.au - a real estate portal similar to iproperty.com.sg in Singapore.

I have worked for realestate.com.au (REA) for the past 7 years from joining as a Systems Administrator in 2008 to becoming an Operations Lead in 2012. During this time REA has grown and seen significant change - most notably moving from an old school IT waterfall organisation to one of the most progressive agile delivery organisations in Australia. Over the past two years I have transitioned into a Delivery Lead role though still cultivate our Operations and Developers in DevOPS at REA.

The achievements that I am most proud of at REA:

• Driven from grassroots the DevOPS movement within REA that resulted in changes from tools and technology to how the IT part of the organisation is structured
• Built, refined and extended our hiring process for our Operations Engineers within REA
• Built and now running one of the best distributed agile delivery teams at REA located in Xi’an China

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