LINE offers various services in the global scene, ranging from its famous instant messaging, content delivery (e.g., news, music, and video), and financial services (e.g., LINE Pay and personal finance app).
The UIT team at LINE is responsible for the web front-end technology of these services, working hard across different time zones from Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and Taiwan. Once in a year, UIT team LINERs across the globe gather together for the UIT Global Workshop. This year's event was held in Korea from September 4 to 6. A total of 130 team members attended the workshop to share their knowledge and experiences in a more global perspective. I'd like to share the interviews of three participants at the 2019 UIT Global Workshop, so that you may get a glimpse of what the atmosphere was like at the event.
Looking in the same direction from different locations - Sungwon Kim
Sungwon Kim is a member of the UIT team in Korea and responsible for developing LINE LIVE. While Sungwon was busy organizing last year's UIT Global Workshop, he was able to wholeheartedly enjoy the event as a participant this year.
Sungwon: "I supported organizing the 2018 UIT Global Workshop. Even though preparing for a workshop requires a large budget and sufficient time commitment, I think it's all worth it to provide an opportunity for all UIT team members to gather together. We develop services for global users. In reality however, we don't often get to meet those users, let alone the developers in other countries we work with. The workshop is a valuable opportunity to network and exchange information."
Sungwon had a chance to work with Japanese team members on various projects derived from the Koromo project, which was initiated by the UIT team in Tokyo. That's why he all the more enjoyed the session on Koromo 3.0.
Sungwon: "I was intrigued by the Koromo 3.0 session presented by Akihiko Okazaki. He could have been a little nervous about being the first speaker, but he was well prepared and his delivery was outstanding. I was also impressed when he smoothly introduced the following sessions. I started using Koromo two years ago when I joined a new project. Later I even used Koromo for LINE@Chat development, but today's presentation was the first time I got to learn about the background of how Koromo was developed and what its vision and design philosophy was. I'd like to extend my sincere gratitude to Okazaki."
At this year's Workshop, there were particularly many cases of speakers sharing their experiences from adopting or developing new technology, with the other internal developers. Case in point are i) Koromo project launched to centralize the design of administrative tools and improve development productivity and ii) Sentry introduced to collect the logs of bugs from web. These are topics that every developer would have thought about at least once during their career. What's more impressive is that they didn't stop at simply telling a story, but took the initiative to form a project and work towards the benefit of everyone involved.
Venue for the exchange of technology among developers - George Duan
George Duan, who develops for the LINE Today service in Taiwan, participated in the UIT Global Workshop for the first time. He's been to many global workshops before, but he still found the 2019 UIT Global Workshop to be a whole new experience.
Duan: "I’ve attended three other global workshops before and I enjoyed it every time. I think this yearly event means a lot to the front-end engineers of LINE because we often work on individual projects daily but have little chance to see how other country’s UIT teams implement their projects and how they think about our own projects. This is a good opportunity to communicate with each other through technical sharing. It was also fun to enjoy a great chicken dinner while exchanging ideas face to face."
Duan had a deep interest in on-going projects of UIT team in different countries and their development culture. During the Workshop, many came forward to share their knowledge and development experience. Duan was especially intrigued by the story-telling of the LINE Securities team in Tokyo about their project development.
Duan: "LINE securities was one of my favorite presentation among others. The material covered almost all aspects of a front-end project, from CI to code level. It allowed me to see the whole picture of their project. I also came up with some ideas to reflect to my own project after the session.”
I was at the spot myself and found LINE Securities team's presentation quite interesting. It was unique that four people gave a presentation in a relay. What I liked more about their presentation was that it allowed me to see the entire picture from beginning to end, starting from why they selected TypeScript, how they adopted Lottie for CI and animation, to what issues they faced from global service.
Special chance to think outside the box - Ryota Agata
Ryota Agata works in Shinjuku, Tokyo and is responsible for LINE News development. At first, Agata was worried if there would be sufficient time to network with UIT members during the relatively short 3-day schedule compared to last year.
Agata: "This year's global workshop was scheduled for 3 days including travel time. Since we have a bigger team globally, I was a little worried how effectively we could communicate in just one day. All my worries turned out to be unfounded. This workshop was very productive. I saw members from different countries get together for a chat on common interests between sessions. I think more cooperation between developers can come out of this event."
Agata enjoys communicating with other developers and found the session on Sentry by Korean team members most interesting.
Agata: "I was most impressed by the presentation on Sentry. To be exact, it challenged me to think outside the box, opening up to new possibilities. I was already aware of Sentry and even an on-going project using Sentry. This session got me to think that collecting and accumulating error data could be used for building up knowledge to resolve future problems. During discussions, I asked the member of the Korean team responsible for Sentry about this idea. The team wasn't planning to accumulate resolution data for now. Yet, he agreed that it was a good idea, considering every programmer looked for answers to a bug by searching through Google or Stack Overflow. I really enjoyed this experience as I was given a chance to think of new ideas by communicating with various developers during the Workshop."
Like what Agata said, we often get new insights when we have a chance to discuss with other developers who have different perspectives. Near the end of the 2019 UIT Global Workshop, there was a discussion session where all of the participants could ask questions and share their thoughts on top of productive presentations. It was a valuable opportunity to learn from different perspectives.
Join us!
Were you able to get a glimpse of the 2019 UIT Global Workshop with these interviews from the three UIT members working in Korea, Japan and Taiwan? There was much more going on at the workshop that we couldn't express in this post.
The LINE UIT team is currently looking for talented front-end engineers who are interested in developing various services. Take your chance at joining the LINE UIT team and join us for the 2020 UIT Global Workshop to network with developers across the globe!