This year marks my second year in Japan. At the beginning of the year, I set several goals, most of which have been accomplished—some even exceeded expectations.
This year, I left G Company, where I had worked for a year and a half, and joined a Japanese startup, which I will refer to as F Company.
Leaving G Company was a planned decision. My initial plan was to work there for about two years to acclimate to the work environment in Japan. G Company operates as a typical dispatch development firm. Due to the covid-19 pandemic in 2022, I chose to join G Company, despite the offered salary being only 30% of the offers I had received in Shanghai. However, I believed that moving to Tokyo would be the better long-term choice.
After 18 months, I had gained sufficient understanding of Japan’s software development environment. Staying in a dispatch company was not a sustainable long-term strategy, given the limited opportunities for salary growth and technical advancement. During this period, I significantly improved my English, which I now use regularly at work, and continued to work on my Japanese. In July, I left G Company and joined F Company, a startup.
Since joining F Company about five months ago, I set three key goals for myself:
In terms of backend development, I can now easily build API servers using Golang and Python that handle millions of requests daily. For frontend development, I am capable of developing web front-end projects of any complexity using modern technologies. In the CI/CD domain, I am proficient in tools like CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Docker, and other widely-used tools for seamless CI/CD workflows and infrastructure management.
Before joining F Company, I hadn’t developed a complex web server for nearly three years. At F Company, the API servers handle over three million daily requests and maintain 30–40 servers across multiple projects and services. While Ruby is the primary development language at F Company, I had only worked on small projects using Ruby before.
Initially, the lack of sufficient documentation and the departure of the previous development team presented challenges. However, after a few months of familiarizing myself with the existing projects, I gained the bandwidth to contribute to new ones. This experience greatly improved my skills in Ruby, project design, and CI/CD workflows. I am now confident in my ability to independently design and develop projects capable of handling tens of millions of requests daily.
Looking ahead, I have set three ambitious goals for 2025:
With the progress made so far, I am excited to take on the challenges ahead and continue growing both personally and professionally in the coming year.