89th Monthly Technical Session

HENNGE’s Monthly Technical Session is held every month and is a platform to share knowledge with other co-workers. A wide variety of topics are spoken and discussed depending on the speakers, some are technical like specific to certain programming languages and some are non-technical such as tips for daily life. Each speaker gives a talk for roughly ten minutes, followed by Q & A. The 89th MTS was held on December 17, 2021.

Okay, let’s dive into the topics we covered this time.

1. High-Cost Medical Care Benefits

Our first speaker was Taizo-san, who works at HENNGE as a back-end engineer. He shared great tips from the previous experience he had to go through when he had an injury before with applicable examples.

If you are not familiar with how the insurance system works and are not able to use it wisely, you may be required to pay a significant amount for your medical care. On the flip side, if you are able to utilize organizational health insurance backed up by the government, you would be able to benefit from lower medical costs. For example, in case of the total cost of a million yen, which is roughly 8,800 USD, (at the time of writing) you may be required to pay 300,000 yen (2,640 USD) for your share. This cost could be reduced from 90,000 yen to 250,000 yen (790 USD to 2,200 USD) depending on your salary range. In extreme cases, where you may need to pay 100 million yen (880K USD) for medical costs, you could reduce it to 1 million yen (8,800 USD). It is still expensive but hey, the amount dropped is 99 %, which is more than we could have asked for. The audience reacted as expanding the conversation to insurance in Japan, in general, is great.

2. Coding Bootcamps: What are They Like?

The second speaker was Mussin. He shared his experience when he joined one of the coding bootcamps in early March this year before joining HENNGE.

“A coding bootcamp is a short-term intensive training program that teaches students practical and job-ready tech skills.”

These programs are usually either full-time, two to three months, or part-time 6 to 12 months long, good for obtaining hands-on technical training. For example, the program he took provided comprehensive full-stack training from programming basics such as data structure and algorithms to specific frameworks like Vue.js and React for the front-end and Node.js for backend. Also, the program touched on sql, REST, GraphQL…and so on. The program costs, say 900,000 yen to 1.4 million yen (roughly 8K USD to 12K USD).

What does a daily schedule look like for this course? It starts with morning stand-ups- discussing the plan for the day, then lectures and research on the topic, then live-code demonstrations. After lunch break, are the core working hours for projects. Some work is done in pairs, lightning talks or presentations are given by the folks, and not to forget, daily homework to be submitted before 12:00 midnight.

Mussin shared one of the projects he went through in this course — Partner API Project, a full-stack application built in three days. The great part of the project is that people worked on this project, collaborating with industry partners such as Stripe, Rakuten, Spotify, and others, using the organizations’ sdk. This time, his team’s mentor was Christoph Nakazawa, the creator of JEST. He mentioned that this was a very helpful and a great experience because being mentored by someone who has leading experiences in the industry and is also knowledgeable on the topics was absolutely valuable.

The main key takeaway from joining the bootcamp was that the deadlines for some of the projects were brutal, but you could definitely build up the confidence of gaining not only the skills needed for implementing projects but also that you now know you could learn things.

3. Advent of Code

Next up was Jeanie who shared challenges participating in the Advent of Code, also known as twenty-five days of fun or twenty-five days of coding challenge — This comes from the Advent Calendar, used to count the days of Advent in anticipation of Christmas. It generally has twenty-four doors or boxes to open, one for every day in December leading up to Christmas day. Some are classic, such as revealing a portion of the story, or some feature a piece of chocolate. In HENNGE, there is a group participating in the Advent of Code together, and she joined the group for fun.

So by participating in the Advent of code, every day you get a coding surprise instead of a piece of chocolate from Dec 1st to Dec 25th. You can solve challenges any way you want, with no language limitation. There are two parts to a daily challenge and part two is only revealed when part one is answered. Usually, part two involves some kind of complexity or a larger dataset continued from part one. Some motivations for people trying these challenges are below:

• learn a new language
• gain problem-solving skills
• be reminded of algorithms from college
• …etc.

It is good for people who are learning new languages because following tutorials only can be boring sometimes. She also shared her friend’s experience who does a challenge every day with a different/ new language! This is also a good way to refresh knowledge of algorithms since many engineers have been away from these algorithms, learned during universities days, such as NP- problems or Dijkstra’s shortest path.

She enjoys participating in the Advent of code because of the freedom to solve problems any way you like, something in common to chat about with folks on the team, following the story is fun and silly… additionally, the subreddit has rich memes! People who join the challenge do some crazy stuff like combine the problems solved with hardware devices and visually show the solution. This is also a competition so you get points if you are in the top 100. We also share a private leaderboard if people are participating in HENNGE group!

4. Lightning Talks

Tonight there were two lightning talks done by Zack and Sean Y.

Let’s start with what Zack talked about JWST, known as James Webb Space Telescope (Webb).

It is a project jointly developed by NASA, European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency to succeed the Hubble Space Telescope as NASA’s flagship mission since 1996, and was originally scheduled to be launched in late 2021, no earlier than 25 Dec. 2021. He explained the main difference between Hubble and Webb. The main thing about telescopes is the size of the mirror. The bigger the mirror is it has more capacity to collect light. Note that Webb has a 21-foot-tall mirror that measures 6.6 meters in diameter as compared to a smaller 2.4-meter wide mirror in Hubble. At the HENNGE office, we locate devices developed by us for monitoring the office and their mirror sizes are 0.0234 meters so if we compare it with Webb, Webb is equivalent to 42,000 of our monitoring devices! So technically speaking, Webb has 42,000 times more capacity for gathering light than our tiny devices!

He shared his passion for JWST and where it comes from. It comes from his experience back during university in HAWAII. The University of Hawai’i developed HAWAII 2RG TM which will go to JWST’s instruments, and he had an opportunity to play around with the sensor in the lab. He also touched on infrared light and why JWST focuses on infrared light. With Webb, basically, it will be able to look farther back in time (galaxies at the time of the Big Bang!) than previous telescopes.

The key takeaway is that there is a high chance to detect another life beyond our solar system with Webb. And it will be launched (hopefully this time) from European Spaceport, in French Guiana on 25 Dec. 2021 7:20 am EST!

The second lightning talk was by Sean Y. from the Engineering Talent Acquisition team. He shared the impact of writing articles on our Medium blog for recruiting and how important it is to the audience who are particularly interested in joining HENNGE.

First and foremost, he thanked everyone who has been contributing articles to the HENNGE Medium Blog. Articles we write on the blog have a wide variety of topics — some are educational, and others talk about some unique stuff such as showing passion for Gyu-don, which is a Japanese fast food consisting of a bowl of rice topped with beef and onion simmered in a mildly sweet sauce. They are all important in terms of giving the audience an idea about who we (at HENNGE) are, what tech stacks we use, and how we spend days at work or at home.

He then shared our Medium performance including the number of viewers, which recently reached about 100,000 views and 57,000 reads. Also, many people are actually visiting our website directly from Medium and many GIP interns also read these articles before deciding to take the opportunity.

Following MST, we had our usual beer bash to celebrate the year-end MTS!