Jon: Hello! My name is Jon Gaul and I'm a software engineer from the US. In April 2022, I moved to Tokyo and started working as a backend engineer full-time at HENNGE! I'm on HENNGE's Access Control team, which manages everything related to our Single Sign-On tech.

Just to name a few things, that includes the portal where people can click icons to log into their services, the logic that allows or denies access based on certain criteria, our public API, and some of the tools our admins use to improve security.

Jon: The short answer is I'd been to Japan a few times on vacations and loved it more with each visit. During college, I participated in HENNGE's Global Internship Program (GIP) in 2019, just before the pandemic. I had a fantastic experience and seriously considered joining HENNGE full-time but initially decided to stay in the US.

After some soul-searching, I realized I wanted to live in Tokyo and work at HENNGE, so I reached out again, went through some additional interviews, and joined the team!

Jon: The biggest difference is the level of responsibility. As an intern, you work on sandboxed projects with a lot of flexibility, which is a great learning experience. But as a full-time employee, your work has a direct impact on the product and customers. Adapting to that pressure was challenging but also rewarding. You get to know your coworkers better and have the full support of a talented team. The open, communicative culture at HENNGE made it easier to ask questions and learn, which was incredibly empowering.

Jon: My day-to-day activities are fairly typical for a backend role, but they’ve evolved while I’ve been here. Initially, it involved a lot of reviewing work, understanding problems, and talking with colleagues. Now, my average day includes reviewing coworkers' pull requests, writing code for both quick fixes and larger projects, and interviewing potential interns. It’s a mix of coding on my own, collaborating with other teams, and ensuring that the work we put out is high-quality.

I’ve mentioned things like peer review, coordinating with others, and learning quite a bit, and I’d say that’s a team strength. When you’re working in security and authentication, you’ve got to be confident that you’re providing a safe and secure experience throughout.

Jon: Reviewing pull requests is crucial to contributing to a longstanding project like mine. The review process relies on the understanding I've built up of how the code is supposed to work, potential failure points, and unique customer configurations. Things like automated testing and review requirements for pull requests are good ways to keep us consistent, but ultimately it’s our culture that encourages asking questions of each other that’s the most beneficial. Knowing that I can rely on that same care and attention from my team is great for peace of mind.

Jon: Sure! Projects range from typical backend tasks like fixing bugs and resolving tech debt to projects with more customer impact.One recent example involved improving how we record and return logs, which required collaboration with various teams as it touched everything from the database to the frontend. Another recent project was implementing a full-stack self-password reset feature, while ensuring it was secure and user-friendly.

Jon: It wasn’t my first time doing front-end work, but there’s always more pressure to have a good user experience when security is involved. We have a good design team, so many decisions were already made for me. However, there were times when we needed to retool older code to go along with these new design decisions, and good communication was essential to keep on the right track.

Jon: Oh, absolutely. And HENNGE does a good job at letting you focus on the new things in your areas of interest. I'm on one of the larger teams where we have dedicated front-end, back-end, ops, QA and mobile. Each one of those teams is constantly iterating in their field and contributing new features to our product. HENNGE’s newer products have smaller teams, of course, and they have even more freedom to push for new and interesting features. When everybody works on all aspects of the product you have even more opportunities to pitch in and gain a wider variety of experience in wider skills through the collaboration that’s required.

Jon: One challenge for our team is that our product has millions of users every day. Mistakes are costly. To me, the most important stakeholder is the customer and ensuring their data is safe is my top priority. But there are more stakeholders, from IT admins at the companies that use our products to other teams at HENNGE. I keep bringing up our open culture, but soliciting feedback from a wide variety of people really is key to making these disparate groups of people happy.

Jon: Teamwork absolutely makes the dream work! Provided that your dream is making SSO products work better alongside some cool people. But I should say that HENNGE also supports self-starters. There are plenty of projects, features, and ideas that came from one or two people pushing for their passion. And those same attributes that make someone a good self-starter also make them an excellent colleague. Whenever I need to lean on them, I'm confident to know that I can. And whenever a coworker leans on me, I take that as a massive compliment.

Jon: It’s kind of a boring answer but not really, onboarding to HENNGE was fairly straightforward. There were challenges learning what I needed to of course, but my colleagues supported me every step of the way. The biggest challenges related to my own knowledge and skill-set as I adapted to a new framework.

Plus there's always some amount of bureaucratic overhead that comes with starting a new job. None of that caught me by surprise, and I don’t think any of that's unique to Japan. Frankly the culture shock was more about life outside of work!

Jon: Living in one of the biggest cities in the world has been such a positive experience. The food, sights, and culture were great as an intern, and now I get to enjoy them with a much wider social circle. My hobbies bring me into contact with fascinating people from all around the world, and living in Tokyo makes it so much easier to meet up with friends compared with the US. My first year here I was so amazed that I wrote a blog for HENNGE about how great it was living somewhere with public transit!

Jon: We have Monthly Technical Sessions (MTS) where anyone can share their passions, technical or otherwise. It’s a great platform for practicing public speaking, sharing information, and making announcements. But those reasons don’t convey what’s great about these sessions. MTS’s are a chance to see passionate people talk about niche and diverse topics you’d never have imagined were rich and interesting. They’re honestly one of the best parts of working here.

Jon: Too many to list! Conference recaps, recent successes or failures, passion projects like someone’s IoT setup for growing wine. One that stands out was a non-engineer talking about dealing with email restrictions and our compliance standards. Not exactly a popular topic, but he had such incredible stage presence that we were all hooked by these invisible hurdles in our very own company. I never thought I would want to learn more about email compliance but here we are!

I also remember one about how front-end considerations for inclusivity and accessibility. It’s a broad topic, and the speaker brought out real-life examples of problems that anyone could face and gave practical, actionable things we could do to improve. It goes a long way when someone can not only share their passion, but also their expertise.

Jon: Jazz, Minesweeper would have been way too mainstream, I would have lost hipster cred for that! This was about an obscure Minesweeper variation released by a solo indie developer back in 2011.

Jon: But the game is pretty similar and anyone reading should check it out! I’ve spent hours playing this variation and wound up developing a script which could automatically play it and win. I was proud of the end result, and MTS was the perfect opportunity to share this cool and weird passion project of mine. I even did a live demo of the script!

The audience loved it, and when that happens HENNGE gives you the opportunity to showcase your MTS presentation as a blog post on our official site. That’s a whole new challenge where you have to think, “OK, this worked as a live presentation in front of tech-savvy coworkers, now how can I keep the engagement and humor but as a written piece for a wider audience?”

Jon: Once you’ve got a complete presentation and blog post, you’ve got 99% of the materials you need to present at a technical conference. And the cool thing about video games and automation is that they're great topics for events like PyCons. But you still have to provide evidence that you can deliver a talk to an audience and bring an interest. Starting out with something like an MTS talk is a fantastic option, because you get to show your idea in front of people who will give great feedback.

My mentor at HENNGE had long suggested I apply to speak at PyCons, and suggested I apply to multiple conferences with the same presentation. I got into more than I expected, though. First was Taiwan, then New Zealand and third was APAC, which was here in Tokyo so I didn’t need to fly for that one. And then the PyCon Hong Kong and PyCon Indonesia double feature!

Jon: HENNGE supported me at every step of this journey in ways big and small. The culture which encourages engineers to talk about their passions, my mentor telling me that presenting at big conferences is possible and achievable, the clear communication that this kind of outreach is worthwhile, then on top of all that paying for my flights and hotels? All that quite literally made this dream possible. It’s not a small amount of time and money that HENNGE spent supporting me, and I’m glad I work somewhere that knows sharing passions is worthwhile.

Jon: In a practical sense, I’m a better engineer than I was when I joined. HENNGE has given me the chance to grow and take on more responsibility and has recognized this growth in turn. The features I’ve implemented and speaking at conferences didn't just benefit my skill-set, but were also rewarded with a bonus and counting towards evidence for a promotion.

I’ve watched the cohort of engineers who joined when I did get rewarded for their efforts in taking on more challenging tasks and senior roles. HENNGE wants to see its employees succeed, and isn’t afraid of setbacks along the way.

Jon: The advice I would have wanted when I was applying as an intern? Don’t be nervous about Japanese working culture! They encourage a healthy work-life balance here and they don’t make you wear a suit as a developer!

I’m kidding a bit, if you’ve got more experience then that advice isn’t as useful. My message for those people is why people stay at HENNGE: regardless of your stage in life or the specifics of your career, HENNGE is a place where your full self is supported.

Your technical skills are valued by a team that wants to support and be supported by you. Your interests, your hobbies and side projects are actively encouraged and fostered. This is a place where you can find work that fits your passions as a software developer - and if it doesn’t exist, you can make it yourself.

That flexibility is cool. It's cool and it's valuable.