My experience as a junior developer and language school graduate
Introduction
Hello! My name is Basile, I’ve been working at Zeals since April 2021. In this article, I’d like to reflect on my journey and share my personal experience as a junior developer going to Japan as a language school student working part-time and eventually transitioning to a full-time position.
As a short introduction, I’m 27 and from southern France, currently living in Tokyo with my 2 cats and girlfriend. My main hobbies are playing guitar, bass and producing music.
My experience
Before Zeals
By age 23, I had graduated from university with a Masters degree in Communication Studies and Cultural Activities, aiming to work in the music industry, working for a company such as a live concert venue, a music label or booking agency. But as is the nature of this industry, finding a job was complicated, the opportunities were scarce and at the same time I quickly lost interest in this industry.
I’ve always been a manga and anime fan, and since university, I developed a great interest in the Japanese language. I started to study by myself and it helped me focus on something and keep my head up in those uncertain times. With no clear career path in mind but the will of traveling and discovering Japan, I did a lot of temporary manual labor jobs, gathering money to finance my first trip. Some months went by and I was able to put my feet in Japan and for the first time, during a 2-month holiday, I visited places like Hokkaido, Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kyoto.
Long story short, I had a wonderful trip in Japan, and I wanted to try my chances living there in the future, mostly because of my love for the Japanese language and the culture I had freshly discovered, but also to challenge myself in a foreign environment and grow as a person.
Going back home to France, I did some research and I came to understand that there was a lot of demand for developers in Japan. I had studied a bit of HTML and CSS at university and I had the feeling I could genuinely enjoy an engineering job. I started to envision programming as a practical career path. I just didn’t know where to start.
One day, I received an email from the French national employment office, it was an invitation to a professional reconversion course for programming. Something meaningful was coming along and I just had to seize the opportunity. I underwent training there, with people of different ages and backgrounds, I learned about computer science and coding, focusing mainly on Javascript and Java languages.
At the end of the course, I did a short-term internship at a very small start-up that was creating a music event-related app with Vuejs and Laravel. Thanks to this bootcamp and the short-term internship, I got my first job as a programmer in a digital agency, developing ERPs with Laravel and jQuery. I stayed there one year, saving the money that would allow me to pay for one year at a Japanese language school and gathering experience that would help me apply for engineer jobs in Japan. Finally, I managed to enter Japan during the pandemic in October 2020, on a student visa.
How I encountered Zeals
I am fortunate to have a friend at Zeals (Vivian Mio Hsieh or “Mio”) that told me the company was recruiting and that there would be a chance to have interviews given I had some coding project to support my application.
With that opportunity in mind, I searched more about Zeals and it seemed like an interesting company, so right during my quarantine in Japan I trained myself to code in React and also study a little bit of Ruby on Rails.
After 14 days, I entered Japanese language school, and I started working on a CRUD app made with Ruby on Rails and React, containerized with Docker. When this app was complete enough, Mio made the bridge between me and Zeals and I got to pass the interviews.
The interviews at Zeals were conducted in a casual manner but structured, mainly focused on getting to know me and my interests in frontend development. As of today, I said I wanted to gain more experience in a forward-thinking company and by expressing motivation, I successfully passed the interviews.
Joining Zeals
After passing the three interviews, I met a few members IRL and had lunch with them. Everyone was very welcoming. I joined the company officially on April 26th as an intern.
My student visa would allow me to work a maximum of 28 hours a week, and I could manage my schedule with Zeals’ flex time work system. I would have school from 9:30am to 12:30pm, and by the time I came back home and finished lunch, I would start working between 14:00pm and 14:30pm until 18:30pm and 19:00pm on average.
It wasn’t that overwhelming to discover the codebase and get assigned to tasks since my teammates were aware of what duties might or might not be a good fit for my understanding and schedule, but that also didn’t hold them back at giving me some challenging tasks as well. With the help of my teammates and appropriate tasks, I came to learn more about Javascript, the Zeals codebase and workflow.
Eventually, I graduated from Japanese language school and passed the JLPT N2. The next day, I started working as a full-time frontend engineer, on October 1st, 2021.
Looking back after 7 months at Zeals
I feel like I’m still at the beginning of my career here at Zeals. There are many things to learn as a junior engineer and recently workflows are getting established as many developers are joining the company. It’s an exciting time to be here and I’m just genuinely satisfied with my job.
What I like the most about Zeals are the people and culture. There are a lot of talented and kind people and through our common goals, I feel connected to these individuals and motivated to build quality products with them.
The environment also permits people to work remotely from different countries and the support from the management and HR teams is highly effective.
In my own team, that is called “For End User — RPA,” we’ve recently adopted the scrum workflow and I must say the communication and interaction between the different stakeholders is very smooth. I can’t wait to see our team getting more and more organized and effective.
Conclusion
Ultimately, I just want to say I’m grateful to have been given a chance and I’m looking forward to returning the favor by becoming a prolific engineer.
It’s inspiring and motivating to see this company live up to its core values.
I hope this retrospection will fuel some readers to pursue their dreams and ambitions.
Zeals is a great place for people of different backgrounds and experiences, and I cannot recommend to you enough to take a chance here!
