About

I'm Hiroki Kondo (KONDO Hiroki / @kompiro), a software engineer based in Nagoya, Japan. In July 2026 I'm starting somewhere new, working toward becoming a staff engineer who holds up the backbone of the product.

My starting point goes back more than twenty years, to when I first met agile development and felt how strong it was as a process for delivering better services. A plugin system I built back then is still running in production today. Since then I have worked at SaaS companies, focused on delivering value to users. I care less about technically hard problems and more about problems that are valuable for users to have solved — I am good at digging deep into a domain, and at incident investigation grounded in a thorough understanding of how the existing system is built. I think of myself as a "solver" engineer: if solving the problem calls for it, I will do whatever it takes, including building the tools.

Lately one question has had my attention: how do you give a coding agent good context? It is not that I ever dismissed documentation. I have always agreed with the Agile Manifesto — working software over comprehensive documentation — and kept the order straight: I write docs in order to ship working software. Aligning understanding between developers could often be done other ways, like pairing. But to get the most out of a coding agent, you have to hand it good context — and that is what has made documentation matter so much more to me now.

fukurou ("owl") shares its bird name with karasu and hato. I want to use this place to write down what I know and, through your feedback, grow it into deeper practical wisdom — somewhere a "chick" engineer just starting out can find something to try tomorrow, and a "sage" engineer with years behind them can stumble onto a fresh insight.

On a lighter note: on my days off you will find me out on long rides on my road bike — and nothing beats the beer 🍻 waiting at the end of the ride. Feel free to say hi.