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…
Kogan.com
https://devblog.kogan.com/ · 20 posts · history since 2023 · active
25 May
3 May
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…
22 Feb
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…
30 Jan
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…
8 Dec 2025
Designing Robust, Scalable, Maintainable Event Architectures Event-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…
10 Nov 2025
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…
7 Oct 2025
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,…
23 Sept 2025
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…
28 Jul 2025
How to load-balance like a seasoned waiter Software 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…
2 Jun 2025
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…
9 May 2025
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…
29 Jan 2025
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…
12 Sept 2024
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…
1 Jul 2024
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…
13 May 2024
A look into the potential impact of generative AI tools in the creative industry Video Killed the Radio Star The 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”…
15 Mar 2024
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…
27 Feb 2024
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…
25 Jan 2024
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…
4 Oct 2023
We had a problem. Our CI pipeline was increasingly becoming a bottleneck in our iOS continuous integration. We here at Kogan like to develop at a fast pace, however we were constantly being held up waiting for builds to complete, leading to a lot of frustration within the team. The rest of the engineering team had switched to using Github…
22 Aug 2023
Introduction: In today's e-commerce landscape, seamless integration with third-party platforms is essential for expanding reach and boosting sales. This technical blog post delves into Kogan.com's ChannelAdvisor integration project, offering insights to software engineers on event-driven architectures, infrastructure automation, and efficient CI/CD practices. Understanding the Challenge: Integrating with ChannelAdvisor posed a significant hurdle. As a renowned e-commerce platform bridging variou