Engineering Profile: Rhydian Thomas, amaysim Sydney

amaysim recently released a completely transformed Mobile App, rebuilt from the ground up in Flutter, a cross-platform mobile platform developed by Google and rapidly earning enthusiastic support from companies as diverse as eBay and SpaceX. 

Re-platforming any application requires a lot of team energy, expertise, and focus. Here at amaysim, Rhydian Thomas led our app team through this exciting transformation. Under his guidance, the team validated the approach with rapid prototypes, learned completely new technology, and completely transformed our two legacy applications into a single, well-architected, well-tested codebase.

Since joining as an Engineering Manager, Rhydian has been a hands-on technical leader, working with our talented engineers to deliver new features, continuously improve our practices and technologies, and collaborating with the many stakeholders who drive our success as a business. 

He discovered his passion for programming early on and earned his bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering & Management with 1st Class Honours at Bournemouth University, over in the UK. Initially, from Wales, Rhydian was sold with the Australian lifestyle including surfing.

We sat down with Rhydian to talk to us on his incredible journey through his role in amaysim, what excites him to lead a cohort of top-notch engineers and his advice for aspiring developers.

How did you first become fascinated with software engineering?

When I was at secondary school, I was introduced to programming in Pascal. I was just getting into surfing at the time, and I wrote a small program to suggest the ideal surf spot, given current weather conditions. It was a hacky mess! But I learnt a lot, enjoyed the technical challenge and creative process, of designing and building a piece of software. It deep-seated my interest in coding and lead me to take a software engineering course at the uni.

What inspired you to accept a role at amaysim?

I initially came to amaysim as a contractor, to help with their mobile apps. A couple of things stood out to me during my initial time here and inspired me to return as a full-time employee.
 
There is a genuine culture of continuous improvement at amaysim that I love. amaysim are open to change and for trying new things, which is awesome. Teams are encouraged to share ideas, learnings and are given the autonomy and space to innovate, trusting teams that it will get the job done. Wins (big and small) are recognised and celebrated. There’s always a sense of inclusivity. You get included in everything. 
 
Then there’s the technology. amaysim have been early adopters of new and emerging technologies, which makes the technology landscape here interesting to work with. In the mobile space, our developers are proactive in ensuring our apps can leverage the latest advancements in OS and tool updates, so your constantly learning new and better ways of doing things.

What team and project are you working on?

I’m currently heading up a small, cross-functional team, looking after the amaysim iOS and Android apps. It’s a great team, with a diverse mix of skill sets and personalities. My focus since joining has been on a mobile apps strategy, the first part of which involved a re-platforming of our native apps. I also contribute to feature delivery, scoping out and sizing new initiatives. There’s a lot of exciting changes coming to our native apps.

What is the most challenging task in amaysim? What is the most rewarding?

Our app re-platform initiative has been both the most challenging and rewarding piece of work I’ve been involved in, since starting here. Like many mobile teams, we were struggling with the challenges that come with native app development — time, and cost of building features twice across both iOS and Android, maintaining feature parity, finding it hard to scale the team given the specialist skillsets needed. 

We decided to move away from native stacks and re-build our iOS and Android apps using a cross-platform tool, called Flutter. There had been a month before we started where we did a whole bunch of spikes, foundations and POCs and then it was two solid months of development and 2–3 weeks of gradual deployments and phased rollouts to our customers. This was a big thing for the apps team, who had been using native SDKs since the inception of the app, and the success of the re-platform is testament to their openness to embrace change and ability to pick up new languages and tools. 
 
The re-platform has put us in a great spot to move faster than was previously possible and to scale the team, as we see native apps becoming the primary channel that customers use to manage their services.

What are your interests outside of work?

I’m a keen surfer and have been surfing since I was in my teens. I also do quite a bit of photography and play the drums. It was a natural progression for me from taking photos on land to take the camera into the ocean, so I bought a water housing for my DSLR and can often be found being washed around eastern suburb beaches taking photos.

What advice would you give to aspiring engineers?

I think if you’re aspiring to progress as an engineer, one bit of advice I’d give is to step out of your comfort zone. When I first started contracting, I was reluctant switching between projects and tech stacks; moving from a Java project to a Rails project, from Swift to ReactNative, Javascript to Dart. I would sometimes feel like I was “de-skilling” by having to park the preferred technology that I’d invested so much time building up expertise, to adopt something unfamiliar. 

In hindsight, being able to pick up new technologies is, of course, a key skill to build in our industry, given the rate at which technology changes. I was actually surprised by the transferable skills and how the change in perspective can help you become a better all-round software engineer.

Special thanks to reviewers including Toby and Rhydian.