47th Monthly Technical Session (MTS) Report
47th Monthly Technical Session (MTS) was held on June 22nd, 2018. MTS is a knowledge sharing event, in which HDE members present some topics and have Q&A sessions, both in English.
The first topic was Unused English Words in Exams by Fukutomi.
This topic is about medical check-up. Fukutomi told us about multifocal spectacles, which is related to myopia and presbyopia. All those difficult English words, which are rarely used in exams, are about conditions of the eye. He also explained some things about thorough medical check-up. Thorough medical-check up often includes large intestine examination. Before the examination, examinee needs to fast and must not eat some types of food.
The second topic was Give Prometheus a Shot by Doi.
Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and altering toolkit. Doi had used other monitoring tools before, such as Nagios and Sensu. Compared to the two of them, Prometheus seems to be the better choice for whitebox monitoring and cloud-based environment.
With Prometheus, time series collection happens via a pull model over HTTP. Pulling over HTTP offers some advantages, such as allowing users to run monitoring on their laptop when developing changes, making it easier to tell if a target is down, and allowing users to inspect target health with a web browser. On the other hand, Prometheus offers Pushgateway, for cases where users must push metrics.
The third topic was BitSummit Vol. 6 by Ogawa.
BitSummit is an indie game festival held annually in Kyoto. It is the largest indie game event in Japan. BitSummit Vol. 6 was held on May 12th-13th at Miyako Messe. 10 thousand people attended the event, and there were lots of international exhibitors and visitors.
Indie games are video games developed by individuals or small teams without publisher support. They rely on digital distributions. Lately indie games are on the rise due to several reasons. The first one is the growth of platforms, both digital distribution platforms and crowdfunding platforms. The second one is the continued evolution of game engines, such as Unity, Unreal Engine, CryEngine, Game Maker: Studio, and RPG Maker.
The fourth topic was New Feature of Electron by Hayashi.
This topic revolves around Electron’s new BrowserView class. A BrowserView can be used to embed additional web content into a BrowserWindow class. It is meant to be an alternative to the <webview> tag. <webview> is used to embed guest content in an Electron app.
Some advantages of BrowserView are Electron team can fix BrowserView by themselves and BrowserView is faster than <webview>. On the other hand, BrowserView is still experimental, its layout can’t be changed with CSS, and it is not possible to bind multiple BrowserViews to a single BrowserWindow.
The fifth topic was PyCon APAC 2018 by Stephen.
PyCon APAC 2018 was held on May 31st-June 2nd at National University of Singapore, School of Computing. The first day of the event was for workshops, the second and third days were for talks. There were 11 sponsors present, which included both Singapore and international companies. There were 100–150 attendees daily, most of which were residents of Singapore and neighboring Southeast Asian countries.
Stephen shared some of the talks that he found interesting. The first is Artisanal Async Adventures by Jonas Obrist, about asynchronous networking. The second is Tell Me Your Secrets — Privacy in Machine Learning Systems by Katharine Jarmul. The third is Detecting Offensive Messages Using Deep Learning: A Microservice-Based Approach by Alizishaan Khatri.
There were no official PyCon events after the talks, but Stephen got to explore Singapore for a little bit. He and the other HDE members who went to Singapore even got to meet one of our alumni, Jeffrey :)
The sixth topic was an explanation of data visualization aspect of one of our projects by Kirby.
There are only two people working in this project, Kirby and Kogure. The ultimate goal of this project is to improve customer satisfaction and reduce churn rate. Kirby shared his experience of working on the project. He reported the tasks he had finished, explained how he solved the problems of his current tasks, and elaborated his future plans for the project.
The seventh topic was Intern at HDE by Ray. He was one of our Global Internship Program (GIP) participants.
Ray said that he liked HDE’s relaxing workspace, balance between work and life, and opportunities to learn together. He appreciated the fact that he was free to ask questions, was able to leave on time, and was able to explore new technologies. He attended various events we held, both technical ones (such as MTS and Front End Workshop) and fun ones (such as Board Game Night).
During his time interning at HDE, Ray explored Japan as much as he could. He visited Asakusa, Akihabara, Odaiba, Enoshima, and Lake Suwa in Nagano, among others.
Ray also reported the things he learned during his internship. He is now more experienced in using Python and Vue. He got to know Docker. He also understood more about DevOps concepts and is now more proficient at some DevOps tools such as CircleCI, Chef, and Terraform. He also appreciated the fact that his English and Japanese both improved during his time with us :)
The day of the 47th MTS was also the last day of Ray’s internship. We had a small event for him and gave him some souvenirs. In turn, he shared some more impressions of his time working with us. Thank you very much for your contributions, Ray!
As usual, we had a party afterwards :)
