SEEK Bytes

Org restructures. New tools. Platform migrations. That “we’re changing how everything works” email. If you work in IT, change is your default setting – but it doesn’t always feel that way. In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Elliott Millar, Will and special guest Sarah Duffy (Enterprise Change Lead at SEEK) unpack how to thrive in continuous change, not just survive it. This episode's special guest: Sa...

Got half-finished apps, tools and games sitting in your GitHub? You’re not alone. In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Seamus, Elliott and Will kick off Season 2 by diving deep into side projects in tech – why we start them, why they stall, and how to actually ship things alongside a full-time IT job. In this episode, we explore: • Where great side-project ideas really come from – using annoying real-wo...

Your tests are green, coverage is high, dependencies are “secure”… so why does production still feel like a house of cards? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Raph, Will and Elliott dig into trust in tech – from subtle JavaScript bugs and leaky abstractions to CDN attacks and noisy security reports – and why a healthy dose of skepticism is one of the most powerful tools an IT pro can have. In this epi...

REST is everywhere in tech – but “we have a REST API” doesn’t mean it’s easy to use, safe or scalable. In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Will, Seamus and Elliott break down the real-world best practices that turn yet-another-endpoint into an API your consumers (and SREs) actually love – from URL design and validation to rate limiting, async jobs and monitoring. In this episode, we explore: • What RES...

AI gets all the hype – but behind every “smart” feature is a blisteringly fast, brutally efficient platform making it work in production. In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Seamus, Will and Elliott sit down with Ren Shao, a Staff Engineer in SEEK’s Artificial Intelligence Platform Services (AIPS) team, to unpack how SEEK’s AI-driven search really works under the hood – from models and rankings to GeoH...

Ever shipped a “simple” feature and discovered your date/time logic is on fire? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, the crew dive into the weird, wonderful and truly painful world of time zones, UTC and daylight savings – and why getting this wrong can break products, reports and disaster recovery plans across your whole IT stack. In this episode, we explore: • Why time zones are way messier than you t...

Remote work is here to stay – but distributed teams are a whole different game. In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Elliott, William Lark, Laavanya Kathiresen and Jerome Chan unpack how SEEK runs truly APAC-wide tech teams across Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia – without falling into “us vs them”. This episode's special guests: Laavanya Kathiresen (SEEK Engineering Director, Candidate) and Jerome C...

What does it feel like to help run a three-year, hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars unification project that merges three tech companies, dozens of systems and thousands of people – and then still keep the job boards running every day? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, CTO James Ross returns to share the unfiltered story of SEEK’s APAC unification, why he compares it to a “house renovation you love but...

What does it really take to merge multiple tech companies, migrate millions of users and jobs, and come out stronger – with zero engineering layoffs? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, hosts Raph, Seamus and Elliott sit down with SEEK’s CTO James Ross to unpack the massive Unification program, why it was worth hundreds of millions of dollars, why it had to be a big-bang cutover, and why the hardest pr...

The toughest lessons in tech don’t come from tutorials – they come from mistakes, awkward feedback and a few bruised egos. In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Will, Raf and Seamus unpack the career lessons they (and others) learned the hard way – from code reviews and clean-code obsession to social anxiety, failure and adapting to very different managers. In this episode, we explore: • How to have impa...

Constant pings. Back-to-back meetings. 600 Slack channels. If your day in IT feels like pure context-switch chaos, this episode of SEEK Bytes is for you. Will, Raf and Elliott break down the biggest productivity killers in modern tech work – and how to reclaim real focus time without blowing up your team culture. In this episode, we explore: • The real productivity killers in tech – Slack overload...

Think senior engineers know every answer, ship only shiny greenfield projects and never get laid off? Think again. In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Will, Raf and Elliott dive into the biggest myths juniors (and even mid-career folks) believe about becoming “senior” – and what growth in tech actually looks like in the real world. In this episode, we explore: • What being “senior” actually looks like...

Your app ships on the shoulders of strangers’ code – and one tiny NPM package can bring production to its knees. In this SEEK Bytes MixBytes episode, Seamus and Raf unpack the wild world of NPM incidents, AI-powered tooling and imposter syndrome, and what they all mean for anyone working in modern IT. In this episode, we explore: • How fragile our dependency stacks really are – the story behind Le...

Your JavaScript is running – but is your runtime doing you any favours on speed, security and cost? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Seamus, Will and Rahul unpack the fast-moving world of JavaScript runtimes and engines – from Node.js and V8 to up-and-comers like Deno and Bun – and what they mean for teams running real systems in production. In this episode, we explore: • What a JavaScript runtime a...

Internal platforms, CI/CD pipelines, GraphQL gateways, job search APIs – the hidden tools behind every product release. In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Seamus, Bridget, Nik and Reyna go deep on developer tooling done right: treating engineers as real customers, scaling support without burning out, and knowing when it’s finally time to turn a beloved tool off. In this episode, we explore: • How to t...

“Tech debt” sounds scary – but what if you reframed it as tech health and made it everyone’s job to keep systems fit, fast and supportable? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Will, Nick and special guest Troy Mcilvena, Head of Architecture (Online) at SEEK, unpack how SEEK moved from hand-wavy tech debt complaints to a clear, business-aligned tech health model that works from startups through to large...

A national telco goes dark, OpenAI drops GPT-4 Turbo, and hard drives start randomly deleting terabytes of data – this high-energy Mixed Byte episode of SEEK Bytes is a chaos tour through the realities of modern IT. Will, Seamus and Elliott Millar break down what happened, why it matters, and what every technologist should be thinking about next. In this episode, we explore: • Inside the Optus meg...

Thinking about your first job in tech or a career switch into IT? SEEK’s software engineering grad program might be your launchpad. In this episode of SEEK Bytes, SEEK engineers sit down with Scott Dann (Graduate Program Manager) and Ben Swart (current grad) to unpack how the program works, who it’s for, and why it’s designed to grow people as much as technical skills. This episode's special guest...

Which tools are winning the real IDE wars – and does your setup secretly say more about you than your job title? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Elliot Miller, Seamus Kearney and William Lark unpack the ongoing battle between editors, IDEs and themes across software engineering, cloud, DevOps, data and more. From VS Code vs IntelliJ/WebStorm vs Notepad++ and Vim to light mode vs dark mode and AI co...

Uni degree, masters, or self‑taught from YouTube and side projects – which path actually works? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, engineers Seamus, Will and Rahul share their very different journeys into software development, from traditional computer science and hardware‑heavy degrees to late‑start uni and learning on the job. They dig into what really made the difference: access to information, mot...

Ever feel like your dev day is harder than it needs to be? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, senior engineers Will, Seamus and Reyna unpack developer experience (DevEx) – what it really means, why it’s tied to burnout and retention, and how it shows up everywhere from tools and tests to tickets and team culture. They break DevEx down into three core dimensions – flow state, cognitive load and feedbac...

Wondering what it really takes to lead engineers – not just manage tickets? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Bridget, Seamus and Elliot sit down with Lester Dong, Head of Selection at SEEK, to talk about the leap from developer to engineering leader and what it means to “build powerful people”. Lester shares how he moved from hands‑on software development into management, how he now looks after 56 e...

Scammy .zip domains, spicy takes on coding interviews, and whether English should “own” programming languages – all in one episode. In this Mixed Bytes instalment of SEEK Bytes, Will, Seamus and Reyna jump between security, hiring and career sustainability in modern software engineering. They unpack why new .zip and .mov TLDs are a phishing dream, share honest perspectives on take‑home tests and l...

Write heaps of tests but still not sure you’re testing the right things? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, staff engineer Rahul Ballal joins the crew to dig into what testing is actually for, how it’s evolved from C++ and waterfall days to modern CI/CD, and why your users should never suffer because of your bugs. From testing pyramids, diamonds and honeycombs to TDD, BDD, black‑box, visual regression...

Seeing GraphQL everywhere at SEEK and wondering what it actually buys you? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, host Seamus Kearney is joined by Nik Skoufis, Reyna Tan and special guest Mark Cheesman to unpack how SEEK uses GraphQL across candidate and hirer systems – from the early “shared free‑for‑all” graph to today’s curated, high‑scale platform. They dig into what GraphQL really is (a query languag...