Motivation

Welcome to the first post of my tech blog. My name is Dylan Lau, and I graduated from the University of Waterloo in Canada, with a Computer Engineering degree in 2018. During my time as a student, I did a total of 7 internships, 4 of which were Software Engineering related. Since graduating, I worked for about a year and a half at Pivotal on Cloud Foundry, and as of October 2019 I’m working as a Software Engineer at Mercari in Tokyo.

As I continue to focus on Cloud Computing, while I was learning about it during my experiences at Pivotal, I quickly learned that Cloud Computing moves fast, and the Cloud Native Landscape continues to expand rapidly. Part of the goal of this blog is to help readers and me keep up with this rapidly expanding landscape. Of course, this blog is also my way of giving back to the community.

I also want to use this blog as a way to improve my writing skills. Writing is an undervalued skill in the world of Software Engineering, and maybe other fields as well. During my internships, I made a habit of writing documentation whenever possible, and fairly often I find myself struggling to word things in a clear and concise manner. This has only amplified due to me working in an environment where it is more common for employees to have English as a second language, so I need to make my writing easy to understand. I will also be using this be using this blog to improve my Japanese, so I will be writing my posts in both English and Japanese wherever possible. There will be some posts that are only in one language or the other.

Topics

As a foreigner settling in Japan, I’m aware that there is also value in my real life experiences. However, I understand that not everyone is interested in my situation, so I will be keeping those blogs separate. This is my technical blog, so all covered topics will strictly be Software Engineering related. Most of my content will be Cloud Computing related, with a little bit of focus in security.

I also plan to have my blog serve as a personal journal, so there may be some posts that are like journal entries, but still Software Engineering related. The journal entries are more likely to be in my life blog.

Feedback

From my work experiences, feedback is incredibly valuable for scoping work and identifying focus points for improvement. I’m aware that the number of readers of my blog will be very limited, but I still hope to receive some feedback. Feel free to contact me via email about anything, whether it is mistakes, recommending technologies, specific questions, topic ideas, anything.