I had the pleasure to chat with Roy, a very experienced programmer that has recently moved to Japan. I think that you will enjoy and get some value from our short discussion.
– Please give us a quick introduction about yourself
My name is Mu Lei (Roy) aka NalaGinrut. Chinese. I came to Japan in March 2024. I found liked this country very much, and I plan to stay and live my life here. I have been a software engineer for 12 years, and founded two companies. Now I’m working as an opensource independent consultant in Japan.
– Why did you decide to come to Japan? Do you mostly work with Japanese companies or your customers are overseas?
I had Japanese customers when I during my first startup company selling IoT product. I got my biggest order from a Japanese customer at that time. So I have a good impression on Japanese companies and their purchasing power.
After the trade war and covid-19, I found it’s hard to do business with overseas customers from China. Almost all my previous experience and skills are for the global market, So I decided to come to Japan to find new opportunities. My main focus is on opensource infrastructure around Linux ecosystem. At least in Asia, Japan is the best choice for me to recognize the latest technology trends and meet my interest in infrastructure. Although Europe is also a good choice for the purpose, I think the Japanese culture is similar to Chinese culture, so I can adapt to it more easily.
– Have you contributed to any open source projects and what have you learned in those projects?
I’ve been contributing to several opensource projects in the long term, include HardenedLinux and GNU. I’m the maintainer of GNU Artanis (https://artanis.dev) which is a Web framework written in Guile Scheme since 2013. If anyone is interested both functional programming and web development, I recommend you try it. The design is largely inspired from Ruby on Rails.
Except for coding, I also contribute to documented best practices. I and my friends are maintaining an AI-infra project on Github (https://github.com/hardenedlinux/ai-infra), the aim is to help people to build their own AI infrastructures based on consumer-grade hardware. The reader who is interested in AI infrastructure can play with it and give us feedback.
I’m also the invited expert of W3C PING that help to review the privacy concerns in W3C specifications.
I’ve learned many things from opensource projects, including coding, design, testing, and documentation. But the most important thing I’ve learned is how to communicate with others. It’s not easy to make everyone happy, but it’s important to make everyone understand what you are doing and why you are doing it.
– What fields in IT do you enjoy working on the most and why is that?
I enjoy working on opensource infrastructure around Linux ecosystem. There’s great joy to me in building something foundation that can be relied on by others. And I like to research on the low-level stuff like OS kernel, framework, and compiler to figure out how does it work, and what could be optimized. I’m also interested in AI, it’s a hot topic in the IT field. I’m trying to combine AI with opensource infrastructure to make it more powerful, and help everyone could build their own AI system in lower cost.
– Any advice for young engineers that want to get into IT (similar fields are you described above) or that want to come to Japan
I would say not only young engineers, but also every people who is interested in IT no matter what age they are.
For them, I strongly recommend to find an interesting opensource project and stick with it for years. Making long term contributions to opensource projects is a very worthwhile endeavor. You will have de-facto mentors from seasoned engineers, add your patches or comments as contributions, and you will get reputation when people can rely on you. You can make friends and practice you English, the least but not last, it’s all free of charge, but you have to invest your time and energy.
I hope you enjoyed. For further discussions you may reach Roy on this email NalaGinrut(at)hardenedlinux(dot)org Replace the brackets with the proper at mark and dot simbols.