75th Monthly Technical Session
Every month HENNGE hosts an evening of interesting and varied technical talks on a wide variety of topics, of interest to both our engineers and other HENNGE members. Our 75th session was held on October 16th, 2020, and was a fully remote session.
VSCode Tools You Never Knew You Needed with Henry
First up was Henry, who gave us a nice selection of extensions and lesser-known but useful functionality for the popular free IDE VSCode. Among the various things, he introduced to us including the ability to sync your settings between machines and all the various GitHub functionalities included in the GitHub VSCode integration (pull requests, issues, checking diffs). He also introduced Edge DevTools, which gives you the ability to launch a version of the Edge browser from inside the VSCode IDE. Using Edge Developer Tools you can check your web dev work without having to build and deploy. And lastly, he introduced Emmet, a time saver for writing front-end code. Emmet is a plugin that lets you streamline your workflow and save time by using Emmet’s abbreviations to generate useful HTML and css code snippets.
AWS Well-Architected At A Glance with Bumi
Next was Bumi, who shared with us best practices on software architecture from an AWS white paper distilled from all the experience of AWS’s engineers. First, he discussed the five important pillars of well-architected software: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.
Some of the best tips learned from the white paper included: testing systems at production scale, automating to make architecture experimentation easier, to allow for evolutionary architecture, and to have the philosophy of driving architecture through data. Another suggestion was to improve response to failures using ‘game day’ simulations that will trigger a failure to let you test that the appropriate response is taken.
Lastly, he shared Amazon’s resources for learning more so that all the developers or anyone interested in DevOps best practices can learn more.
Web Scraping with Python with Derrick
Our GIP intern Derrick gave the next talk about his experience using web scraping. He described the two main ways to do web scraping — either by inspecting the HTML of a website directly or by requesting data directly via an API (relies on the API information being available). He showed us the python library and selenium scripts he used for web scraping and talked about his experience actually using web scraping with Final Fantasy 14 to make in-game currency. He also gave a demo on how to use web scraping to aggregate useful stock market information.
Another Oversimplified Explanation on Business Valuation with Ogura-san
Our CEO, Ogura-san, gave a talk to help employees understand the current way SaaS companies are valuated. He also tried out a fun overlay for OBS with us that let people put real-time comments across the screen during his talk.
SaaS company stocks might look crazy as far as valuation to the casual observer. For public companies, Ogura-san explained that the market price is the fair value, but people can also have their own opinions about how to valuate SaaS companies. First, he explained the basics of stocks and valuation, and what affects valuation.
Next, he explained about SaaS companies and their valuation specifically and how they cannot be valuated by traditional methods. SaaS companies are usually valuated based on contract value. Currently, the PSR (EV/Sales) method is getting popular to value SaaS companies, compared to P/B or P/E methods. It was a very informative talk for all of us — since HENNGE is a publicly-traded company now, it’s good to be able to better understand how we might be valuated.
Tekumi Post-Mortem with Jonas
Our last talk of this MTS was from Jonas, giving a post-mortem on Tekumi, the project he worked on for Inspire Matsuri 2019. In Inspire Matsuri groups of cross-team employees have the opportunity to develop new ideas internally with the potential to grow them into new business. First, he explained the origins of the Tekumi project — he was annoyed with our current translation workflow and saw that as a pain point that others might share.
The current workflow was not painful enough to fix it immediately, but for Inspire Matsuri he saw it as an opportunity to expand the issue and solve a more generalized problem for both himself and others. And thus, Tekumi was born. He discussed a lot about technical and human lessons learned both during the development and growth of the project, and also specific problems encountered post-launch. He also gave some useful advice on giving a pitch — participants in this year’s Inspire Matsuri will definitely find that advice useful.
GIP honor day
The last item in the schedule was to honor Derrick, our GIP intern, who was concluding his internship. He was presented with a certificate of appreciation and a gift. We are very grateful that he chose to spend his time with us and have best wishes for his future.
After MTS was over we followed it with remote socialization via our regular ‘beer bash’. It was nice to be able to catch up with coworkers who we don’t get a chance to talk within the office these days!
