December Avanade Developer Interview - Souichi

Intro

For this final instalment in the year long month developer interview article series, I interviewed?Souichi Kitai, a Back End Developer in Japan.

Tell us a bit about yourself Souichi

Hi, I am Souichi Kitai. I was born and raised in Hokkaido, in the north of Japan, famous for its snow and ski resorts.

After graduation from High school, I moved to Brisbane, Australia to learn Computer Science. I studied at Queensland University of Technology(QUT) where I learned a few programming languages such as C#, Java, JavaScript (React) etc

I found it quite challenging to major in an IT field in a second language and found it difficult learning new things in new a environment but at the same time, enjoyed meeting new people from all over the world.

I moved to Tokyo Japan two years ago to start working at Avanade as my first job.

What does your current role entail?

My current role is a mobile application engineer in an ongoing online bank project, and it has been almost 6 months since I was assigned.

Because the application is based on Hybrid Framework (Angular), it did not take hours for me to catch up. I am now enjoyed being part of this role and project even though I do not have any background at mobile app dev.

There are basically three main tasks that I was assigned to, such as investigating a reason when an incident occurred, developing new features for the app, and communicating with the client and designers.

Since the project has utilized scrum development, a new version of the mobile app is released every month. The interesting part of this project is that I am in charge of every phase, such as, planning architecture, development, and unit testing.

What does your typical day look like?

On weekdays, I tend to go to an office for working due to the project requires developing and testing with physical devices, and other security reasons.

I usually wake up at 8 am and start preparing for work and arrive at the office around 10am. Since I do not have enough energy to prepare breakfast after waking up, I tend to go to a convenience store every morning to buy simple breakfast such as rice ball, coffee, and bread. I know that not eating breakfast is considered as bad practice for health, but I would rather sleep as long as I can.

However, going to office is not mandatory and sometimes I work from home.

How would you describe Avanade and its culture?

If I was to describe what Avanade is like to other people, I would say that Avanade is consisting of professionals in any It fields. I have met several people through different projects, and each of them was sophisticated in specific IT area, such as backend, frontend, UX, consulting etc....

With regarding Avanade Culture, I strongly feel that Avanade respect all employees regarding our future career decision making and daily work environments. It is significant that we can have conversations with our manager before being assigned to a new project and discuss whether the next project match with individual preferences.

How did you get into tech? What would you like to do in the future?

As I mentioned, I majored in computer science at university and needed to code to pass several assignments. Initially, I hated coding so much since I did not have any programming experiences back in high school and could not fully understand the concept of databases, backend and frontend. (I want to thank to “stack overflow” which always help me when I face an error.) They were just so different to each other and could not get point of learning each element itself.

However, one day I started realizing, “hang on, we need a database for storing data”, “we also need backend for getting data from database”, “we need frontend for showing data retrieving from backend”. Suddenly, each dots becomes lines, and each lines becomes surface. This is when I am getting interested in IT fields.

What kind of projects have you been involved with?

I have done couple of projects so far, mainly focused on frontend.

The first project I was assigned was to create a mock application and front end coding for asp.net MVC. The projects were intended to add some features onto an existing custom portal site, and I oversaw front end coding and testing. The custom portal site was composed of CsHtml, jQuery and Asp.net MVC.

The second project is the one I am currently being assigned. Since I have already mentioned in detail in above section, I will not illustrate in this section.

What is Japan like?

If I describe What Japan is like in one word, I would say “convenient”.

Comparing with other countries I have visited, it is a lot easier to buy anything I want anytime in here. When I was in Australia, Mc Donald’s was only one option when I got hungry late at night. However, there are couple of options available such as convenient store, Beef rice don, Ramen, and of course Mc Donald’ s.

If you could have a superpower, what would it be and why?

I wish I could live without any sleep. I sometimes think that sleeping is a waste of time, just lying on bed and doing nothing for 6 hours. According to research, the average human being spends ? of their life in bed, which is the equivalent of 20 years. Compare that to a Giraffe which only sleeps 1.9 hours per day! What an efficient animal.

Of course, it is impossible to live without any sleep, but we do can reduce the time by effort in order to spend rest of the time doing other things. Besides, at least, we can stop watching mobile phone before going to bed or after waking up.

What is your most favourite thing in the world that you could not live without?

Collecting gadgets, especially Apple products, like iPhone, iPad, apple watch etc... No matter how expensive they are, I dedicate my life to collecting them.

?What do you think the future will be like?

In the future of IT development, everyone might be required to know fundamental knowledge of Cloud technologies such as Azure, GCP, AWS etc... Each project I have ever assigned uses cloud service and I was always required to interact with them.

In addition, in front end development, even if you are front end engineer, you would have to know some backend languages such as ruby, python, Java, etc due to new technology, so called web assembly.

What advice would you pass on to the next generation of developers?

It is important to know that each developer should always follow development trends and new technologies that is not standardised. The reason is that because those trends always change every year, and you may be able to use them in the future projects. As far as I know, new technologies tend to have better performance and sometimes fix existing problems.

Wrapping up

Thanks Souichi for sharing a bit about yourself and what you do. Not needing to sleep is an interesting choice in superpower - and I did not know that giraffes slept so little!

I have enjoyed getting to know Avanade developers around the world, learn about what they do in their roles and listen to what they have to say about life and culture at Avanade.

If you have enjoyed this months article, make sure to go back and look at previous months interview articles.

And make sure you check out the many open positions at?careers.avanade.com

I hope you all have a wonderful festive period and wish you the greatest success in 2023!

-- Lee