HENNGE Celebrates its 100th Monthly Technical Session
On May 30, 2014, HENNGE began holding short conferences on technical topics held by and for peers. These Monthly Technical Sessions (MTS for short) have grown in scope, survived company change-ups and a global pandemic, and featured a wide variety of speakers from every department at every level of technical detail.
November 18, 2022, marked the 100th MTS in HENNGE’s history. As a celebration of HENNGE’s commitment to sharing knowledge and interests, this MTS featured special guests and talked about the history of the event series itself. Starting with…
Spirits of MTS
HENNGE’s very own CEO, President, and kimono guy, Ogura-san, began by talking about influences in his own life that he has worked to bring to HENNGE’s culture. He began with his experience as a Junior High School student in 1987 and his attempts to make a video game in BASIC. At the time, there were no practical ways for him to meet like-minded programmers online, so he made friends with other students in his school with similar interests. At each others’ houses, they would talk tech, describe their solutions for game mechanics like scrolling and shooting, and read through monthly magazines that provided source code.
While Ogura-san was a university student, the internet started to change everything forever. With Windows 95, everyone had a way to quickly and easily access the World Wide Web. Suddenly it was possible to talk to programmers from not just one’s school but from every school. Newsgroups and email lists connected people, while translator groups sped up the exchange of information to never-before-seen speeds. While the open-source movement was still in its infancy at this point, we would soon see its true potential.
Come the 2000s, that potential would come into focus. HENNGE (by another name) existed at this time as well! Its flagship product was not an access control and email suite but a Linux control dashboard. This era was marked by a boom of collaboration fueled by open-source culture, but that same culture often felt too casual or cold. One could talk to millions but finding people to work closely with remained a challenge. Without a sense of excitement, learning and developing still weren’t where they could be.
Over time, mailing lists and usenet forums would give way to hackathons, tech conferences, and meetings both on- and offline. In 2014, MTS would join that list of ways to share excitement about one’s successes and failures. At this point in the presentation, Ogura-san described MTS as “miraculous.” But what is different about MTS? What makes it something miraculous? Two theories:
- MTS features both insiders and outsiders at the company. In addition to regular employees, GIP interns and new hires are obliged to present on a topic of their choice, bringing in ideas from outside the company and giving them a chance to showcase what they care about.
- Presentations strike a balance between technical and non-technical topics. HENNGE has a strong culture of respect for each other, including respecting each other’s strengths, talents, and interests.
Now that COVID-19 is becoming less of an issue, we are glad to return to meeting in person and sharing information together. In one sense, we’ve advanced very far from talking with classmates over coding magazines. In another sense, we remain the excited school kids rushing to share our passions with each other. Ogura-san closed by thanking everyone who has shared, listened, and put in the work to bring us to MTS 100.
Past and Future of HENNGE Design System + Takeaways from Schema 2022
Sara was up next, presenting on HENNGE’s migration to a Design System, or DS. Like me, you may wonder what a design system is. Consider a DS a collection of building blocks. By working from these building blocks, a cohesive look can be achieved across all services which use the system. In short, it’s what makes HENNGE’s products all look like they come from the same vendor!
But things weren’t always this nice. In April 2021, HENNGE’s product line featured inconsistent branding and more than one hundred unique shades of gray. This was a big challenge for the design team, and without a way to build upon successes, they could redesign pages forever and not get anywhere. Atomic design would come to the rescue.
The team’s DS journey began in Figma with low-level parts like icons, colors, and fonts. These are the atoms in Atomic Design, and they can be combined into more complex arrangements called molecules. For example, an atomic icon can be used next to text in an atomic font to create a button. Then that button molecule might show up on a page alongside other elements to form an organism. This incremental adding of complexity meant that the design team’s successes built on themselves over time.
Of course, the DS doesn’t matter if it isn’t used, which has meant significant redesign work on existing pages. Even now, the statistics on the DS’s use are padded by the junk components and styles which are imported but not updated.
And there is more fundamental work to be done as well. Sara presented three takeaways from Schema 2022, a design conference by Figma:
- Better design tokens: Similar to explicit variable names in coding, this change helps to show where components should be used. Plus, this change allows common use cases to get edited together.
- DS for non-devs: The more people involved, the more ownership across the organization. Further, getting everyone to contribute covers more accessibility use cases and allows for more inclusive design, a key priority for the team!
- Small companies like HENNGE have an advantage due to agility: The amount of work to redesign our products is already non-trivial. For large companies, a redesign may be impossible. By acting quickly and leveraging this advantage, HENNGE stands to have a more usable DS as we grow.
Beyond this, Sara spoke about the desire to cultivate HENNGE’s らしさ, a unique charm or essence that we could convey through our DS. Our current product looks good but doesn’t capture HENNGE’s creativity or who we are as a company. This change, however, requires more involvement across the company to identify something that, by definition, is hard to describe! In an embodiment of the open-source spirit of the company, as the DS becomes a mature system, we will be able to share it on Figma for all to see and use.
For more from the design team, please visit https://note.com/hennge_design/.
100 Months of Technical Sessions
Bagus gave us a walk down memory lane with his presentation filled with photos from the earliest MTS’s and trivia about how the talk series found its identity. This section of the blog will be heavily abridged, as he’s currently writing up a full-length blog post on his presentation.
But in short, MTS began on May 30, 2014, on the 11th floor of our office building. Since then, it’s changed floors and venues, started publishing write-ups to our pre-Medium blog, gone virtual, and returned to being held primarily in person. Its core identity as an opportunity to share information with coworkers has held constant, however, and despite the challenges it has faced, it’s clear that MTS will hold strong for the next hundred sessions!
Continuous Improvement Through Internal Development
After a short break to shake off the nostalgia from the previous slides, Jennifer spoke to us about her experience coding an internal app to help with auditing the hardware we use. This isn’t the first app she’s made for HENNGE members, but this one’s specific use case and the lessons she’s collected make it an excellent case study.
As a part of our internal security audits, we check to make sure we’ve fulfilled specific requirements. Among other things, we make detailed audits of what devices people are using and whether those devices have their settings correct. Pre-2019, this was done by pairing up and checking both peoples’ hardware. From 2020–2021, this task was a self-audit reported via google form, which was audited again by IIT. This system was slow, inefficient, and took a lot of manual effort. Especially as a tech company, we could do better!
Jennifer described the requirements from the user’s and organizer’s standpoints: the user needs a simple and clean way to know what to do, each step shown should be relevant, and the steps should be updated as the user goes along. Meanwhile, the organizer needs well-organized, immutable data in a format that is easy to double-check.
To satisfy these requirements, she wrote an AWS Lambda backend to serve questions to a Serverless Slack bot which would then ask them from the user. Answers would then get logged in DynamoDB. The full diagram she showed us is below:
Thankfully, the user experience is much simpler than reading the diagram. The slack bot just walks you through a list of short, clear questions with limited possible answers and even links to an in-depth guide for even more information.
Initial feedback was great, convincing people to do paperwork doesn’t usually go well… except for this time. Over 60 people responded within the first hour! This was almost too positive, as a small misconfiguration meant that the earliest people to submit their data had it lost within the system. However, Jennifer’s decision to log everything meant that these responses could be reconstructed. The remaining users to answer got the benefit of a convenient and easy system, and the data was correctly saved.
Overall, this was a great example of technology directly helping HENNGE people do their jobs better. The design pattern Jennifer described was a sweet spot in terms of good UX and utility for the auditors, and the outcome speaks for itself.
4 Lessons Learned from tadrill Business
Imaizumi-san went next, introducing one of HENNGE’s latest product offerings: a tool for increasing security awareness and automating email safety training. This tool is so new that the press release was only published the week before MTS 100!
One of the standout lessons from this talk was the difference between a customer’s burning and non-burning needs. Non-burning needs are nice to have but may not translate into a contract. Meanwhile, a customer will sign a contract for a product that solves a burning need even if that product doesn’t exist yet. In this case, tadrill started as a sales deck and Figma prototype and managed to get customers to sign contracts. This approach relies on trust, but by selling to existing HENNGE One customers, we have a pool of potential buyers who already know our high standards for quality.
Another key takeaway is the Japanese acronym TTPS. Literally “徹底的にパクって進化させる,” this can be translated approximately into “plagiarize and evolve.” There are competitors in this market, but we should still try to enter the competition and do better than them! If there’s no clear winner in this field, then there’s room at the top for us.
Given that v1 of tadrill was developed using outsourced developers with internal development to refine it into a v2, Imaizumi-san also spoke about some of the unique challenges associated with this development style. Of note, this puts far more pressure on the project manager to describe and outline all necessary specs, which the company will do to the letter. In HENNGE internal development, individual developers and PMs have much more freedom to consider user needs and find room for improvement on their own. That back-and-forth development process is a strength but one that’s difficult to recognize from within the company.
Taking tadrill from an idea to a saleable product has already given lessons that can be applied company-wide. It’s sure to provide even more lessons as it develops over time. I’m looking forward to hearing even more about HENNGE’s latest product!
How we sell HENNGE One
Finally, Yuta-san, Kohei-san, and Saya-san gave a demonstration of what it looks like actually to sell HENNGE’s products. As a programmer who’s usually far, far away from this part of the business, this presentation was a refreshing change of pace. The presentation alternated between discussing their selling points and roleplaying how they are presented to the customer. Saya-san played our ideal customer during the presentation, a ~500 employee manufacturing company with 3 IT admins that’s already using several cloud services.
HENNGE’s IdP services are foundational to our business. Covid-19, the 3.11 Earthquake, and the rising popularity of the Zero Trust security model have pushed the adoption of these cloud services. Kohei-san played the part of a salesman, responding to the pain points Saya-san listed as a midsize company. In particular, the popularity of remote work coupled with its increased security requirements makes HENNGE Access Control an important feature for sales, and I’m not just saying that because I work on that team.
Meanwhile, their demonstration of how HENNGE Data Loss Prevention is sold gave me an appreciation for our product which I’ve never before considered. The common pain point of how secure files might be easily leaked very clearly resonates with our customers. This will sound obvious to say, but the work our teams put in to make our products user-friendly results in a shockingly user-friendly experience. The roleplay section sold me on the utility of features like automatically converting attachments to URLs and securely generating access PINs for the intended recipient.
Finally, we got to learn about customs law in Japan. In particular, the rule is that emails must be saved for three years for auditing purposes. This is a huge pain point, as the cheapest version of Office 365 doesn’t have this ability. With HENNGE, small to midsize companies can pay for HENNGE and get those features.
MTS often trends toward technical topics, but nontechnical topics like this really show how strong HENNGE is, thanks to the diversity of its teams.
With these excellent presentations over, we celebrated with a gathering that was much like the ones we have after every MTS, but the extra company and excitement from the event gave the gathering a special sense of community. And like any good milestone, we celebrated with a cake! Now, who can cut the cake for us…?
