Joining oVice as Lead SRE
My name is Shogo Ito, and I joined oVice as a Lead SRE in November 2021. My internet name is @showwin. In this article, I will look back on my previous job and write about three challenges I expect to experience at oVice.
I have also written this article in Japanese, so please go to the article if you want to read it in Japanese.
I worked at LAPRAS, the company that proposed a new method of hiring software engineers, at the end of October 2021. I joined the company in November 2016, just after its founding, so I worked there for five years. I worked for my first company for 1.5 years, which means I worked for more than three times as long, but I feel it still was a short five years.
What I have done in LAPRAS
What I did before the summer of 2020 is described in the article “I’m stepping down as CTO at LAPRAS” (JP), so I’ll skip that and summarize my activities as SRE for the last year.
My main focus was to start setting SLOs. Details are summarized in “SLO Operation in LAPRAS” (JP). I also conducted emergency drills to check how to deal with a hypothetical incident, usually called Chaos Engineering. Please also read this article, if you are interested in it. “The LAPRAS infrastructure team conducted an emergency drill” (JP).
I apologize to non-Japanese speakers for linking some Japanese articles. Machine translation tools are excellent these days. Please take their help!
What is good about LAPRAS
As I have told the coworkers of LAPRAS many times, the first impression that comes to mind when I look back on the past five years is that I have worked with excellent coworkers. My definition of a “good coworker” is a person who has the following two characteristics.
- They have a lot of skills and abilities that I don’t have and provide positive stimulation by working together.
- They are not evil people who attack others or communicate in a way that lowers others’ motivation.
The content of our work fluctuates between exciting tasks and sometimes dull tasks that don’t motivate you, but the people we work with remain the same. If the coworkers are great, you can be happy every day. I never once felt like I didn’t want to work today in LAPRAS because great coworkers surrounded me.
We were able to have such a good group of coworkers because @hshimada_, CEO of LAPRAS, has a policy of only hiring people who are better than the average in the company. Unfortunately, it is not practical to keep this policy as the organization expands, and this rule is no longer in place. In addition, we all participated cultural interviews until we had a large number of employees, about 30. Please refer to this article for more details. “Why does LAPRAS conduct recruitment interviews with 25 people to 1 person? The importance of Culture Match” (JP).
Thanks to LAPRAS
It was a rare experience to be involved in a startup as the third member and to experience various phases in a short period. It was a great experience. Thank you, @hshimada_, for inviting me, and thanks for the new icon as a graduation present! I’m taking this opportunity to update the icon I’ve been using for 11 years. And I love this icon because it symbolizes my more rounded personality compared to 11 years ago😆.
LAPRAS is full of talented engineering members, and I believe that the company and its business will continue to grow. I hope LAPRAS will become a game-changer in the software engineering recruitment market, and I will watch from the outside.
Joining oVice
I’ve been working as a Lead SRE at oVice since November. I’ve decided to join as a full-time employee after working on the side since July.
Since I felt very comfortable at LAPRAS, I thought I wouldn’t go out unless I found an environment where I could challenge myself in many fields, but I did, to my surprise. The following are three areas that I found attractive.
The challenge of the working environment
There are four development bases in Japan, Korea, Tunisia, and the US, and we develop in about three time zones: JST(+9), CET(+1), and PDT(-7). Since the overlap of working hours is very short, it’s crucial to develop asynchronously and efficiently. Documentation is essential.
Of course, the team is multinational, and the official language of the development team is English. I want to learn English so that I can work in a foreign company in the future. Here is a place where I can use both Japanese and English, so it is perfect for studying English, and it’s easier than English only environment. Since most of the members on the business side are from Japan, Japanese is the official language throughout the company. Don’t worry, of course; you don’t need to use Japanese to work!
Here’s my current situation. I started studying English in earnest in May, and since then, I’ve been taking one of two online English lessons every day, but in the meetings at work, I can understand about 80% of what they say, and I can convey about 30-40% of what I want to say. The sentence structure is different from Japanese, so I need to practice more to speak fluently.
The challenge of Engineering
As an SRE, I wanted to take on the challenge of maintaining a high level of reliability in a high traffic service. oVice has a rapidly growing number of users, and the service includes functions that place a heavy load on the infrastructure, such as calling and screen sharing to hundreds of users. I can grow as an SRE by maintaining and operating this kind of service.
We are also replacing our application in Elixir, which will be an exciting challenge. I’ve never used a functional language as my primary language at work, so I’m also looking forward to this challenge.
The challenge to spread remote work
I worked for a company that allowed remote work after I graduated, and even in LAPRAS, I have been working remotely since the coronavirus pandemic. As a person who does not like to go outside as much as possible, I have a strong interest in the issues of how we can work more productively online.
Due to the spread of COVID-19, many people were forced to work remotely. However, many people felt that the remote working tools in the world were still inadequate, especially in terms of the quantity and quality of communication.
I want to change the world where people are forced to commute for communication reasons by providing an environment where people can work without any inconvenience, especially in terms of communication.
Today, when COVID-19 has calmed down a bit, how far the remote work culture will remain depends on the evolution of tools, and I hope to increase the option for working through oVice.
Conclusion
Our development team just started in-house production this summer, and we still don’t have enough developers. We are looking for people who want to build a strong, healthy development culture together.
Please also check out my colleagues’ article “Joining oVice as VP of Engineering.”
