93rd Monthly Technical Session

Every month at HENNGE, we hold a mini internal conference-like session for sharing knowledge and ideas called Monthly Technical Session — MTS for short. The 93rd MTS was held on Zoom on 22 April 2022, including talks from members of some of our development teams, and interns who were participating in our Global Internship Program at the time. This time, we also had a talk from the People Division about their recent activity.

Remote work with children

Rie gave the first presentation about her working experience with her children during the covid-19 situation. She experienced three major “crises”. She shared how she overcame it and good points even under “crises”.

The first crisis started on April 7, 2020, when the first “state of emergency” was declared in Japan. Nursery schools requested children to refrain from attending school for more than a month. She said this time it was not that hard because her husband also was at home because his workplace was also closed so he was able to take care of the children while she was working.

The second crisis started in Summary 2021 when the 5th wave of covid-19 struck Japan. The schools, which her children attended, were closed several times and her husband had to work at that time. She deployed several goods like a trampoline, gaming console, and aqua beads so her children could spend time with them.

The third crisis, which was the most difficult situation she said, started in Fall 2021 when the 6th wave of covid-19 struck japan. At this time, her child became a close contact person. She had to work with her children at home because they couldn’t go out. She had to give up on doing things well.

At the end of the session, she shared good things about working with children: Her children could see how she was working, and her children seemed to enjoy spending time with the family.

Introduction to NestJS

Next up was Edward, who gave a talk on an introduction to NestJS. He had been using NestJS, which was a server-side Node framework, and he shared why he liked using it.

He introduced NestJS, which is a server-side framework to build efficient Node applications such as REST API for large-scale enterprise applications, uses TypeScript out-of-the-box, and is designed for readable, scalable, and testable but is based on a very opinionated structure.

He shared the graph regarding how many questions were posted on StackOverflow, which indicated Express was still top but NestJS was also becoming popular.

There were several points why he liked NestJS: It worked very well with TypeScript, it forced him into writing in a specific way that was clean and readable, it came with exceptions built-in so error responses happened in a standardized way, and Next CLI generated applications came with a default testing environment.

MUI v5

Following the frontend topic, Takashi, who is a frontend engineer, also gave a talk on MUI v5, which he worked on before joining us.

MUI was formerly known as Material UI, which was React UI framework. He shared the updates in MUI v5, which was released in September 2021: migrating the design framework from JSS to emotion/styled-components, and adding new components such as data grid, auto-complete, pagination, and skeleton.

He also shared an example of how a new design framework used in MUI v5 would look like compared to the old way. In MUI v5, you could write less code to build a component now with Sx prop and the performance was 8 times faster than the previous version.

Geotagging camera photos with a script

After a short break, we continued the session with a talk from Billy whose one of his hobbies was photography, which was today’s topic.

He sometimes received questions about where he kept the backup for his photos. He used to use Google Photos for backing up photos on his iPhone because it was unlimited and also used an external HDD for the camera. Starting on June 1, 2021, Google started charging money for the storage used with Google Photos. He considered upgrading the subscription but he decided to build his solution, which was NAS (Network-Attached Storage) because it was hard to migrate to another service if he wanted because there were already 2TB of the photos.

He had another problem; his camera didn’t have a GPS tracker and was unable to put GeoTag (EXIF) information.

To resolve those problems, he built a program in Python to put a geotag into the photos in his camera by using the GPS information in the photos taken at the closest time with the iPhone.

Now he had a NAS for the backup storage, which had a task scheduler to run the script he built automatically.

International Women’s Day 2022: What I’ve learned

The last speaker of this MTS was Miguel, who gave a talk on what he had learned through organizing an internal corresponding event to International Women’s Day 2022.

He had a question: “Whether or not I was the right person to be organizing the event and whether I had considered how women in the company felt about it.”

In this talk, he introduced terms such as “Male privilege”, which meant the system of advantages or rights that are available to men solely on the basis of their sex, and “cisgender”, which meant a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex.

He found that the thing about the privilege was that you really didn’t notice it until you educated yourself about its existence. He shared what he did for it.

The first thing was asking a female colleague in his division: “How do you feel about it?”. He was very grateful that she was open and honest and told him she had a feeling kind of weird about an event supposedly for women that had been yet again organized by men. He said sometimes being humble and simply asking was the best way to get an honest answer. He decided to take a step back and took a supportive role.

This brought him to the second point: calling each other out. None of us are perfect. We all benefit from some sort of privilege in one way or another. He then gave one of the concrete examples, the use of gender-inclusive language. He started paying more attention to the language he used because our language is a direct reflection of our mental landscape, which had an unconscious bias he had which gender should be performing which job (e.g. cleaning lady, pool boy).

He realized how little time he had spent thinking about the subject and how little he knew about it. He felt guilty about being ignorant and blindly following the trends which are already biased. He took positive steps to educate himself by reading books, one of the books was “Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed by Men” which he introduced to us.

He believed now that it was his duty to continue to educate himself and hopefully others in the process so that we could move through the fog of unconscious biases and unthinking preferences towards a brighter future that is equal and inclusive for everyone.

As usual, we had Beer Bash after the session on Zoom🍻🍺!