Hi! I’m @aisaka from Mercari’s Engineering Office.
Mercari’s engineering organization fosters a culture of mutual learning and growth, always striving to create an environment where our members can learn from each other, freely take on bold challenges, and grow.
DevDojo, a series of in-house technical training programs, is just one example of how we promote and maintain this culture.
Since last year, we have been releasing portions of our DevDojo series externally (click here for details), and now we have decided to release even more new DevDojo content!
Today’s blog post will give you a brief intro to the sessions that are now open to the public, as well as an overview of the specific content.
Learning materials Website
What is DevDojo?
DevDojo is a comprehensive in-house training series that is meant to help participants improve their technical skills. As you may have guessed, the name “DevDojo” is derived from a combination of the words “development” and “dojo” (the Japanese word for a place of training or learning, especially Judo or other martial arts)."
The content that makes up the series is diverse and packed with the knowledge and ideas of Mercari and Merpay engineers. An overview and summary of the entire training program can be found here.
The program is held in April and October of each year. The April sessions usually coincide with a period when new grads join the company, and this year there were lots of new grads joining, so it was a particularly great session!
DevDojo is open to any member of the company, not just engineers, and this time we got about 50 participants from all across Mercari Group.
Here is what we’re making public!
More than half of Mercari’s engineering organization is made up of employees hailing from outside of Japan. With this in mind, we have adjusted our DevDojo lessons to be taught half in English and half in Japanese.
The Global Operations Team, an in-house team of language service experts who provide translation and interpretation internally at Mercari, also makes their services available to provide simultaneous interpretation at all DevDojo lessons.
For this content, we have already released recordings of the lessons being taught in the original language (whether that be Japanese or English)
Now, without further ado, let’s take a look at the new content!
Introduction to Machine Learning
Image search is one of the unique features of Mercari, and is achieved by training an AI to machine-learn vast amounts of data. This lesson goes over the general concepts of machine learning (“ML”) as well as the fundamentals of AI and ML. It also introduces how ML is implemented at Mercari by using actual projects as case studies.
Design System for Mobile
Design systems are something that Mercari is heavily focused on in the interest of providing our users with a sustainable and consistent user experience. In this lesson, we will explain the basics of design systems for mobile, and how we actually create and operate them at Mercari.
Introduction to Mobile Development
Mercari’s mobile development workflow has established rules for release cycles and operational processes in order to improve the user-friendliness and how fast we can release new services. This lesson teaches the development cycle and process actually used in the development of Mercari’s mobile services.
Successful Scrum Team at Mercari
Scrum development, an agile development methodology used at Mercari, is a framework in which small teams of developers work in repeated development cycles over a short period of time. This lesson explains the basic concept of a scrum, the development process at Mercari, and its objectives.
Slide-Japanese / Slide-English
Introduction to Design Doc
This lesson teaches the basics of the design docs (also known as technical specifications) needed for product development and introduces the templates that Mercari is currently using. It also explains how to write a good design doc and how design docs are used at Mercari.
Introduction to Authentification Platform
As a payment platform, Merpay requires authentication and authorization for secure transmission. This lesson goes over the basics of accounts and authentication and AuthN/AuthZ, and gives an overview of the authentication infrastructure used throughout Mercari Group.
KYC in Action
As a payment service provider, Merpay conducts identity verification for users who wish to engage in transactions using the Merpay platform. This lesson explains the basics of KYC, the different types of KYC, and how they are used at Merpay.
Quality Assuarance Policy at Merpay
Quality assurance (“QA”) is essential for being able to sustainably deliver services in a safe, secure, and rapid development cycle. This lesson covers the QA processes, tools, and techniques that we use to quickly identify and resolve problems.
In closing
We will continue to update the DevDojo series so that the training materials can be used not just by Mercari employees, but by the engineering community. Through this program, we hope to contribute to the engineering industry as a whole, both in Japan and overseas.
The content that we are releasing this time is primarily excerpts from full lectures. However, in the future, we would like to release DevDojo’s “hands-on repository”, which contains the actual code used for the hands-on drills that participants use to practice during the program.
Releasing in-house training materials to the public requires a high level of coordination between many different individuals, including those involved in choosing which excerpts to release, editing, branding, content review, and so on. The release of this content was made possible by the cooperation of many Mercari and Merpay engineers, EMs, and team members, and we would like to take a moment to thank them for their contribution to DevDojo!
Lastly, Mercari Group is now actively hiring engineers! If you are at all interested, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
