Chose to Be An Engineer to Break Down The Borders

Heeey Shuzo! You got haircut and now you are like a modern cool guy, you used to have a exotic one though haha. Today, I’m going to interview you. First, please introduce yourself.

- I already miss the hair I had. My name is Shuzo Otani. I was born and raised in Japan. Now, I’m Senior at Keio University (SFC).

Oh, you are in SFC. I’ve heard many rumors of the difference between Keio and SFC. Before you joined Zenport, what had you been doing?

- Well, I personaly think SFC is short for "Shakai Futekigou Campus". There are actually many weirdos haha, and I was the one who wanted to be a part of it.

I started learning how to code when I was junior, and I joined a startup that my friend was working for. The team was 90 percent composed of students at SFC, which felt like we were building a "startup" as Mark Zuckerberg did. Although I was totally beginner for development, I could learn a lot very quickly since we built pretty much everything from scratch. That's how I kicked off with my career as a developer. So almost 2 years have passed since then. Along the way, I have done some internships at small company to large company.

Wow! You have a lot of experiences to work as an engineer already. How come you started learning and working as an engineer, because I feel the number of students who work like you is still pretty small?

- When I got into SFC, some tech startups such as airbnb, uber and instagram were getting huge. I've always wanted to create that kind of life-changing service. I was so excited to change the world making use of Internet which is great tool to connect people all over the world and to leverage what you can do.

You considered very deeply and decided to become an engineer. I must learn something from your style. So, after working in several companies, what brought you to Zenport?

- First of all, I kinda made my mind to bet on Javascript Ecosystem as a developer because JS is very huge today. You can do whatever you want with JS like building an mobile app as well as web using ReactNative as Zenport does. Zenport fully makes use of modern stack such as React, GraphQL and GoogleCloud, which is what fantastic engineers can do. I'm so amazed how fast they catch up with new better technologies. I found that amazing. And also, I'm going to work in Canada from this September for a year, so I looked for something similar to environment in Canada. As you know, Zenport members are very diversed. we're from 🇺🇸🇫🇷🇨🇳🇮🇳🇹🇼🇯🇵, we have different backgrounds. That's why we speak English in the office. I liked that. I was surprised how communicating in English makes flat and open company. I really feel comfortable to work with this team.

Zenport Sophisticates The Speciality of A Geek

You have such a sound and concrete reasons to join us. So tell us what you are doing now.

- Mostly I’m doing web frontend for our service Zenport. I can take ownership and help each other to make a better product. even thougth I’m an internship. I have learned so many things from this fantastic team, especially from Maxime FullStack Superman about software development. I oftentimes have some difficulties with English. As a matter of fact, I sometimes struggle to tell them exactly what I want. but That's what I need to get through now to achieve my goal of working wherever I want. I have to get out of my comfort zone and embrace many failures to move forward.

There you go! I feel and want to learn programming skills too, I know it is not so easy tho. Then, from now on, what do you want to do and to be in Zenport and your future?

- I wanna keep improving my development skills and English as much as I can. and I feel like building my own company whenever I work in a startup. I think I like this sort of exciting air, maybe it's my brain who makes me excited with so much dorpamine though. There are still so many problemes that we can solve in the world. I wanna make use of my skills to make people's life and out future better

You are considering your life very seriously, and actually I admire you that you have already had the skills to be an engineer and the potential to be another one with the specialities. I feel I’m very motivated to learn programming skills more now haha. All right, this is the final question. What type of person do you want to work with in Zenport?

- I wanna work with someone who has some sort of entrepreneurship to get through a tough journey together enhancing each other. and someone open-minded who wants to work in flat environment. Thank you Reo for taking time to interview me. Let's go back to work mate!!