Rightmove Tech Podcast

The Rightmove Tech Podcast brings you news, views, and interviews from the Rightmove tech team.

Welcome back to the Rightmove Tech podcast! In this episode, Ana and Chris speak with Elliot, Director of Technology, and Ayca, Senior Data Scientist, about AI. They talk us through the exciting ways in we are exploring AI solutions at Rightmove, both internally and externally, as well as career pathways and deeper insights into how these models work.

Listen in to find out more!

Elliot talks about the RAID project, which stands for Rightmove AI Discovery. This is a project to explore potential use cases for AI across Rightmove, be it for property hunters, Rightmove partners or internal engineering teams.

I do think the right strategy at this point is to invest in AI, and it’s about taking advantage of its current capabilities, but also creating a sort of readiness to take advantage of what’s around the corner.

There are several exciting potential use cases for AI, including (but not limited to) improving the core search experience for property-hunters and offering AI-boosted keyword search possibilities.

At this point, I see Rightmove offering a boost to existing functionality rather than creating complete new experiences. But over time, I think that’s going to change, particularly with images or video.

Elliot talks about how we are already using GitHub Copilot in the engineering division and plans to support engineers with learning the new AI skills they will need.

I think it’s going to be something that everyone really needs to have some good skills in. So we need to make sure that we help people with that. It’s important to help people find the right work, that’s going to keep them interested and help them develop.

Chris and Ayca talk about how she got into the AI field; she started with a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics and then went on to do a Master’s in Applied Statistics. Her first role was as a Data Analyst, and over her career she has led several AI and machine learning projects at different companies.

Ayca highlighted that strong programming skills are a must for those looking to break into this field, with Python being the go-to language for many in AI.

This role allows me to engage with innovative projects and apply strategic thinking, all within a supportive environment where leadership truly appreciates the significance of data and innovation.

A career in AI is not just about handling data and building models, but about understanding how this data works towards making meaningful outcomes. It’s about seeing the bigger picture.

In this section, Ayca sheds fascinating light on the subject of Large Language Models (LLMs) and how they evolved from older models like Word2Vec and FastText. While these two methods relied on static word embeddings (a high dimensional vector representation of a word), modern Transformers can dynamically generate embeddings based on the context of a word in a sentence – in her own words, a game changer! Transformers can be trained on much larger data sets because they can process all words in a sentence simultaneously and can learn patterns about how language is used in different contexts.

At the heart of Transformers is the attention mechanism, which allows the model to focus on different parts of the input sentence when predicting each word.

Ayca acknowledges that choosing the right model is a challenging problem, given the vast amount of AI models currently out there. You should assess the model against the right benchmarks, such as RUGE or GLUE, depending on what you want to achieve.

Models […] process vast amounts of unstructured text. They learn by predicting the next word in sentences over and over again on a massive scale. By doing this, they learn statistical relationships between sequences of words and the context in which they appear.

Ayca and Chris also delved into some examples of the problems that can occur when a model hasn’t been trained successfully and suggestions for how to overcome these challenges.

Aaaaand that’s a wrap for Season 1 of the Rightmove Tech podcast! Thank you for joining us on this journey – stay tuned for news on Season 2 and, as always, thank you for listening.

Produced by Ana and Chris.
Edited by Chris.
Reviewed and published by Appy.
Artwork by Tay.

The post Podcast: AI at Rightmove appeared first on Rightmove Tech Blog.

The Rightmove Tech Podcast brings you news, views, and interviews from the Rightmove tech team.

Welcome back to the Rightmove Tech podcast! Apurva, aka Appy, Senior Software Engineer at Rightmove, joins us this time. Appy is a coding whizz and a master of chess. She took the stage at a Rightmove-hosted meetup, captivating the audience with her insights into TypeScript patterns.

To kick things off, we address the under-representation of female software engineers in speaking roles. Appy shares her thoughts on why this gap exists and how we can work to change it. She emphasises the importance of visibility and diverse representation from an early age. As she aptly puts it, “Showing children they have every option available is crucial.”

Being visible and having a diverse group of people being visible to children – showing them very early on, they have every option available is important.

Appy’s talk at the meetup delved into discriminated unions and decorators in TypeScript, sparking intrigue among the audience. She sheds light on why she chose these topics and how she came across the concept of discriminated unions. Exploring TypeScript’s role in frontend development, she emphasizes how thinking about types and data models upfront can lead to better system design and architecture. Appy explains why TypeScript has become a go-to tool for many developers and how it enhances the development process by catching bugs early and improving code quality.

As a developer, thinking about the types and the data models upfront helped me design better systems and introduce better architecture.

As we wrap up our conversation, Appy reflects on her talk at the meet-up and shares insights into the audience’s responses. She challenges the misconception that speakers always have to bring entirely new topics, emphasising the importance of keeping presentations engaging. With her closing advice for aspiring speakers, she encourages authenticity and relatability, reminding us that engaging talks resonate regardless of the topic.

I find presentations fun now!

Stay tuned for more insightful episodes on the Rightmove Tech podcast!

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The Rightmove Tech Podcast brings you news, views, and interviews from the Rightmove tech team.

Hackathon from hack and marathon, is an intense time bound event where teams of developers, designers, and other tech enthusiasts come together to collaborate on software projects.

Every year, we have the Hackathon season at Rightmove. It’s a three day event across our three offices in London, Milton Keynes, and Newcastle. This time, our focus was on generative AI. We spoken to some of the people who took part.

The primary goal of the Hackathon is to brainstorm, create, and deliver a functional piece of software within a short time frame. It’s all about innovation, experimentation, and rapid prototyping.

Hackathon is a place that you can think out of the box and you can try different ways, maybe shorter ways, maybe smarter ways. Once the event is finished, have that mentality with you and you bring it back to your team

– Ahmad, Lead organiser for the Rightmove Hackathon 2023

We had 141 participants across [our] three different sites Newcastle, Milton Keynes, and London. We defined about 26 projects and 7 different awards: best for consumer, best for customer, best for Rightmovers, best Generative AI, and then best presentation, best blogpost, and best overall hack.

– Ahmad, Lead organiser for the Rightmove Hackathon 2023

We chat to three teams over each day to see how they’re getting on

Ready for the demo? Yes, we are. I’m actually sitting looking at a whiteboard, which has got the breakdown of the presentation on it. So it’s five minutes, which is quite an aggressive timescale for being able to explain it, how it worked, what we did.

– Nick, representing the Pretty Property Pictures team

The winner of Best for Generative AI award went to FloorPlAI (generating descriptions for our floorplans using AI). We spoke to Elliot about what makes a winner.

what really did it for FloorPlAI was that in terms of an application of AI, it really demonstrated some capabilities that really you can only do with that sort of technology. In particular, it demonstrated extracting data from the harder to reach places. So generally for us, the harder to reach places to extract data are unstructured data. In the property world, that’s going to be images or free text descriptions.

– Elliot, judge for the Generative AI category

The winner for Best Overall Hack went to Pretty Property Pictures, so we couldn’t help but catch up with Nick again.

we’ve had so much fun over the three days just taking images of properties we’ve found, our own properties, one of our friends just bought a house, we redecorated that too, and just going, hey, what could we do if?

– Nick, representing the Pretty Property Pictures team

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The Rightmove Tech Podcast brings you news, views, and interviews from the Rightmove tech team.

In total, 9 super talented graduates from the Makers Academy bootcamp joined Rightmove as associate software engineers. With so many we couldn’t speak to all of them, so this time we picked 3 to discuss their careers with us.

And our incredible guests have had very different jobs before becoming software engineers:

In this episode we talk about: the trigger to change careers, their experience on the Makers Academy bootcamp and conquering their first role as Associate Software Engineers at Rightmove.

I came across a book that says you cannot change the environment you are in, you cannot change the people you work with. So I started to think about what other things I could do.” – Tay [at 4:10]

Spoiler alert, the book that inspired Tay was “Rich Dad Poor Dad”, by Robert Kiyosaki.

“I open a business to sell cakes online. I built my own website and I found it fascinating!” – Tay [at 4:25]

“One word for 16 weeks [to describe the time during the bootcamp], I would say ‘process’ because we’re gonna have ups and downs there, but we need to trust in the process…” – Tay [at 7:56]

“…it was a really intense course, you learned a lot of things in a very condensed period of time.” – Naomi [at 8:36]

“…there was people ready for us to be like: let’s look at your CV, […] let’s practice some like interview questions…” – Naomi [at 9:40]

“…it felt like it was going to be impossible to land one of the roles [at Rightmove], but just put in effort with application and perhaps it was just an unbelievable stroke of luck.” – Stephen [at 13:11]

“So my previous roles needed a great deal of tenacity when trying to solve difficult or complex problems that were seemingly impossible. I found that has proved pretty useful when grappling with coding problems that don’t initially seem to make a whole lot of sense.” – Stephen [at 17:53]

…I was never really happy with what I was doing and now I’m here and I’m finally doing the things that I like and enjoy. – Naomi [at 22:01]

I just want to get really good at what I’m doing now. -Naomi [at 22:07]

We hope you enjoy listening to this podcast as much as we enjoyed making it. Watch out for another one coming soon…

The post Podcast: Makers at Rightmove appeared first on Rightmove Tech Blog.

The Rightmove Tech Podcast brings you news, views, and interviews from the Rightmove tech team.

These are some of the areas we explored during our short but sweet conversation:

David has nearly 40 years of experience in the tech industry. His role is to line manage 20 backend Java engineers. He helps them in their day to day role to be successful at Rightmove – supporting them in their teams, helping them with career development, helping them with learning opportunities. In addition to this, David works with 2 teams, helping them deliver their tech roadmap.

“At Rightmove, we really value learning, development and community.”

David also runs the tech community that crosses all disciplines: frontend, backend, QA, design and product.

“The tech community is a great place for us to be able to allow that crossover of ideas. A cross-pollination between our different skill groups. It’s a it’s a way of supporting engineers’ growth. It’s a way of encouraging them to take ownership of their development.”

For David, empathy towards people, strong engineering skills and determination to push forward are the 3 key characteristics of an Engineering Manager.

“You need a lot of empathy to listen to understand where each of your engineers is. Everyone is at a different stage of the journey. You need to adapt your style and your approach for your different reports.”

David has done a lot of work with this Tech Blog, and determination and challenging people have been key to make it grow.

“When you work in an organisation, you want to have an impact. If you want to make a difference, if you want to introduce change, you have to be determined. You have to be able to push really hard.”

We hope you enjoy listening to this podcast as much as we enjoyed making it. Watch out for another one coming soon…

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