Previously, I wrote about my experiences in becoming a software engineer nowadays. It has been a challenging and long journey since then.
Facing challenges is one of my favorite objectives for choosing a company, and LINE is one of the best challenging companies I have ever faced.
Who is LINE company?
https://today.line.me/th/v2/article/VV3DxJ
LINE is a worldwide company that started with a chat application called LINE, which emerged in Japan and expanded to many countries in Asia, especially in Japan, Thailand, and other countries.
In Thailand, my country, we already reached 50 million users (from 69 million mobile internet users in Thailand) last year and continue to grow. If you have experience traveling to Thailand, most Thai people mainly use LINE to communicate with each other.
https://www.everydaymarketing.co/trend-insight/why-line-is-good-for-online-business/
From the perspective of software engineers, this could be the best challenging opportunity to deal with massive traffic and learn from other talented software engineers.
Why does LINE inspires me the most?
And what things did I learn from this company that may inspire you as mine?
Localized companies and products
https://www.marketingoops.com/news/biz-news/new-ceo-line-thailand-life-infrastructure/
LINE has various offices in many countries, each with localized products. But we believe in our philosophy of closing the distance. Since we believe each country will have a different culture and way of life, LINE allows each country's sub-company to create its products to serve its people.
Even though we started with a chat application but currently, we have many applications widely used both as global products and localized products as we have in Thailand
The localization allows us, LINE Company (Thailand) software engineers, to propose ideas to create and improve the products openly. This culture gives us strong ownership of the products, and this trait escalates many improvements without any boundaries to put us down.
Challenges that you will never find from search engine
Usually, when you have some issues, you may find solutions from communities like Stackoverflow and blogs. But when working in LINE, sometimes the problems you are facing might not be the ones someone has already solved.
For example, LINE is one of the leading tech companies that leverage Kafka heavily in our system. One of the problems we faced was a limitation of the partition number of Kafka that we could create traded-off with limited resources. So we made the library called Decaton to handle this problem and crack our bottleneck.
In Thailand, as I mentioned earlier, we have massive traffic and leverage Kafka a lot to handle this. But our software programming specializing in Thailand is Golang (Java creates Decaton), we decided to build another library written in Golang but based on the same principle and name it Decagon (with "g" instead of "t").
We use this library across our localized products in Thailand internally (we don't have a plan to release it to the public yet).
Show me the code
In Thailand, we have a sub-culture inside our engineering department, "Show me the code" is one of the favorite quotes in many conversations during our development process and discussion.
We believe the talk is cheap, then show me the code. This quote lifts us in many directions, such as evidence-based and data-driven. We firmly believe, and it runs in our blood.
The culture of showing me the code is so much intriguing because we will discuss every discussion based on the evidence, results, and data that can be measurable. And it pushes us to another level of research to rely on reason rather than emotions or feelings.
Excellent teamwork
One of the atmospheres and cultures I'm proud of, especially in my team, is excellent teamwork. Whenever we have bugs, issues, challenges, or incidents, we always help each other fix them without blaming them and look for the best solution to solve them efficiently and appropriately.
Even in some technical discussions that wouldn't have consensus, we still believe in the idea of "Disagree and commit" with the total effort to deliver that solution.
Closing thought
Even though I'm not graduated in computer science and have roughly journeyed until becoming a software engineer, fortunately, I have many chances to learn and grow from the top tech companies, especially LINE.
I'm learning a lot from LINE and still keep learning continuously from endless challenges and great colleagues.
Get to know me:
