Gumtree has dominated the UK classifieds market for over 20 years! With over 23% of the UK’s population searching for their next ‘Good Find’ each month — It’s safe to say, Gumtree connects thousands of buyers and sellers every day!

This week, we caught up with Weili Dai; a Senior Front End Engineer within our Monetisation Squad, we discussed what cool & exciting projects Weili and his team are working on, as well as his road to becoming an A* software developer.

Weili, What inspired you to become a Software Developer?

My dad is a software developer. And I always had an interest in computers. It’s a rewarding profession. And I get to work with really smart people.

What’s your proudest moment at Gumtree.com

When I resolved a “roadblock” that was preventing a huge legacy infrastructure platform from being able to be decommissioned. The roadblock prevented us from moving to a new platform and was sucking up resources (from both having to maintain the legacy platform and downtime from people having to switch back and forth).

What tips would you give to someone working with their development team in the tech industry?

Ask. Don’t be shy to ask for help. And ask the right people. There were countless times when I asked people for help, and the information they gave saved me hours (or even days) of work if I had to do the work myself. In software development, there is a codebase versioning tool called Git which shows the history of who made what changes in history. When you are stuck, use that to find the contact persons. If that person is still at the company, ask them. They will normally be very glad to share knowledge on the work they have done.

What are the biggest challenges that you face as a Senior Front End Engineer?

Since I have worked at Gumtree for a long time and worked on many projects, I automatically become the first go-to person people will think of when they have questions. So I get lots of ad-hoc questions every week from lots of different people. Whilst I enjoy helping people, it does take time away from the things that I planned to do. I haven’t found a good solution to this yet. But I guess recognising it is a good first step!

What is something that most people don’t know about you?

I almost didn’t get the job at Gumtree. I submitted a coding test that failed one of the criteria on the marking scheme at the time. But I decided to follow up with evidence of past projects, immediately after receiving the rejection email. And that subsequently earned me the chance to come for an interview.

What are the crucial things a software developer needs to do to stay ahead of their game?

I would focus on staying in the game, rather than ahead. I feel like every day I am accumulating experience. So consistently showing up over a long time will make a huge difference. Like what Warren Buffet calls The Snowball Effect. And the great thing about that is, the more experience I have, the quicker I learn new things. Some things that took me days to figure out five years ago, probably takes less than an hour now. So to stay in the game, you just need to find things that keep you interested. Recently I try to spend more time on knowledge sharing and mentoring which I am really enjoying.

What exciting things do you have planned for 2022?

Gumtree is in the middle of spinning off from its parent company. Currently, a lot of Gumtree non-core business services rely on third-party platforms which were “prescribed” to us by the parent company. The spin-off will open up opportunities for Gumtree to re-evaluate these third-party platforms, and possibly choose more effective ones.