This is mainly my work-related updates. The work environment has changed as much as I have changed the job, and I have been busy this year. I will summarize some topics.

Involved in product development

I won't explain the background, but I was developing the company's main product. In my career up to now, I have often been involved in research and development, but this is the first time for me to be fully involved in the company's main product development. As you know, I enjoyed and loved working with new technologies. However, I also found it interesting to solve the real problems that required speed and flexibility due to business decisions, and I felt that I could contribute more to this type of work.

It was also the first time for me to work closely with not only development engineers but also product managers, designers, QA engineers, and many other professionals. And I learned a lot from them in terms of speed of decision making and how to think about customer experiences.

Learned more platforms

Specifically, I was developing iOS, Android, and Backend in this year. Before that, I had practical experience in machine learning, embedded systems, and web frontend. I had no practical experience in any of these areas, but I was able to release the features I developed with the support of those around me. I understand not only how to write code, but also the entire development cycle, including operations.

Due to schedule and other constraints, I had to output while learning. Therefore, I gave up on trying to understand everything, and instead read company's codebase to understand the internal conventions and write code that looked like it (like machine learning models), and I decided not to learn unnecessary things to achieve my tasks. I have released bugs due to a lack of understanding of platform-specific behavior, but I learned a lot through fixing the bugs and its post motems I probably can continue to get opportunities to develop them, and I will improve my understanding of them in the future.

Now that I have more technologies that I can use and have confidence that I'm able to learn new things as well in the future, I will be able to think flexibly about future opportunities to select technologies for my hobbies and work.

Looking back on my career

I remember hearing a great person say something like, "I have only been about sincerely dealing with things around me. That's my career." at an internal career study session, and I thought it was cool, so I put it into practice in my own way this year.

I deprioritized my personal technical interests and did what I had to do to solve the problems required for my projects. I have several things that need to be improved in this approach, but I was happy that I was able to contribute to the people around me through my own efforts.

Conclusion

I had good opportunities to learn new things in 2022. Thank you for this year and Thank you for your help next year.