87th Monthly Technical Session
MTS is Monthly Technical Session held at HENNGE. The speaker will give a short speech about what they are interested in at the time (technical or non-technical).
The following is an introduction to the session held on October 22, 2021.
“AWS AppSync 101 ~ A case study~” by Doi
Doi -san introduced how their products take advantage of AWS AppSync. He said that they’re trying to use it to speed up the development process and give the front-end developers full control.
He presented a case where there was a requirement that heavily depended on the front-end, and AppSync was used to simplify the schema definition. He explained the logic behind combining APP Sync with the existing UI and backend.
They also discovered that AppSync had the potential to be used in new B2B SaaS products.
“AWS Resource Provisioning with Ansible” by Hans
He was inspired to make the presentation after an intern asked him, “Why does HENNGE use Terraform?”
Now we use Terraform to manage cloud resources (e.g. EC2 instances in AWS) and use version control to manage the configuration. He said we can do similar things with Ansible and explained how to do it.
He talked about how Ansible is flexible and useful when you also need to configure the remote host. But he also mentioned that Terraform is still useful the part of using ECS.
Ansible is also able to run shell script, build and push docker images, and can create a kind of CI/CD which also can be run locally.
The compilation of Ansible and Terraform will be very powerful, he summarized.
“How to Survive Childcare Leave” by Matsuura-san
He talked about his experience of childcare leave (November 2019 — April 2020). The reason why he uses “Survive” is because we will not be paid during our absence.
He explained the costs of prenatal and postnatal care and the systems in place to deal with them.
He also mentioned that there is a point to note about the monthly income, the “Maternity allowance/Childcare subsidy (育児休業給付金)”. That is, it takes two months from the start of the childcare leave until the actual payment starts.
He also introduced several support systems, albeit with some limitations(Day-care fee / Child Allowance System).
He concluded by saying that it is a good idea to simulate the financial situation during maternity leave and consult with HR in advance.
“Lip-Syncing Videos” by Bagus
He said that he likes to immerse himself in video games. (Yes, me too!)
He shared a short video explaining how he was immersed in the game’s music and scenarios but lost immersion when the character's mouth movements did not match the character’s speaking voice.
He introduced a tool called “Wav2Lip” to match the character’s mouth movements with the audio. It uses a pre-trained lip-sync discriminator and a visual quality discriminator.
Since it was unable to detect the faces of animations, he shared a successful example where he was able to lip-sync using a video of a real person.
Finally, he gave several examples of applications, for example, lip-syncing translations, generating missing video call segments, and talking memes, stickers, GIFs, etc
“Deep dive into lessons becoming intrapreneur” by Sai
First, she explained the difference between an entrepreneur and an intrapreneur. Entrepreneurs have more freedom but are riskier. Intrapreneurs have internal resources and are less risky. But both need to take on the role of leader.
Next, she outlined a new business to create. First, come up with an idea and validate the pain. Then clear the product’s goals. And the other important thing is team forming.
After those, she said, is user research, and listed the things that need to be done for that.
She said that the next step is to plan for MVP. Provide minimal functionality to trial testers, get feedback, small successes, and discussion.
The last step is to recruit β trial users and monitor them and get the product market.
Finally, she shared some summaries about the Wakaba project: it is a project to launch a new project.
“PyCon JP 2021” by Jonas
The last speaker was Jonas, who gave his report on PyCon JP 2021.
He gave introductions to some of the lectures he was excited about.
One was the second day’s “match/casein Python3.10” by Brandt Bucher. He said that it’s really interesting if you are interested in how match cases work and how features are learned in python.
He then said that he had things to do and couldn’t introduce any other great talks. So he explained his role at Pycon. He said that since everything was done in Japanese, he did his best to translate the opening, closing, etc. into English.
Usually, PyCon is held in a large venue, but this time it was held in a hybrid format: day one was on-site and online, and day two was fully online.
For the on-site part, due to COVID-19, there were some restrictions such as mask and social distance. And for the online part, there was a slight change this year and they used Discord. It worked well, he said. He also said that what was interesting was the nesting of Zoom.
He concluded by saying that he was happy to be a part of PyCon as a member of HENNGE!
Looks like there was a beer bash as usual after all the sessions!
