fukurou

About

I'm Hiroki Kondo (KONDO Hiroki / @kompiro), a software engineer based in Nagoya, Japan. Over twenty-some years I have moved from a systems integrator to a tool vendor, a SaaS company, and a non-tech business. In July 2026 I'm starting somewhere new, working toward becoming a staff engineer who holds up the backbone of the product. 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.

Career

  1. 2026.07 –

    Current position

    • Building web applications with PHP / Laravel and Vue / Nuxt.
  2. 2024.09 – 2026.06

    Yamashita Co., Ltd.Tech Lead / Architect

    • Led the renewal of the business systems behind a care-equipment rental business. Analyzed a large legacy system with the C4 model and designed a phased migration.
    • Shipped a new CRM (Go / Next.js) to production in August 2025 and began rolling it out to about 70 branches without stopping their operations.
    • Set up weekly releases with Release Train and Feature Toggles, and a design process built on DesignDocs and ADRs.
  3. 2015.10 – 2024.08

    freee K.K.Software Engineer / Lead Engineer

    • Worked on the Rails-based accounting system. As development owner of the invoicing feature, took requirements from user interviews through to implementation.
    • Rebuilt the local development setup, cutting onboarding from a week to under a day. Built a data aggregation platform in Go / Ruby connecting banks and accounting software, and took part in the move to EKS.
    • Served as lead engineer and team manager while launching a new invoicing service.
  4. 2006.09 – 2015.07

    Change Vision, Inc.Software Engineer

    • Built the project management tool TRICHORD with Scrum / XP — where I first felt how strong agile is as a process for delivering better services.
    • Designed and implemented the OSGi-based plugin system of the UML modeling tool astah*. It still ships in the product today.
  5. 2004.04 – 2006.08

    A systems integratorSystems Engineer

    • Joined out of university. Built job-search and government systems, and maintained macros that generated source code from Excel design documents.

Talks & Writing

Skills

Languages
  • PHP
  • Go
  • TypeScript
  • Ruby
  • JavaScript
  • Java
Frameworks
  • Laravel
  • Vue
  • Nuxt
  • Next.js
  • React
  • Ruby on Rails
  • Spring Framework
Infra
  • AWS
  • Terraform
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes (CKA / CKAD)
Data stores
  • MySQL / PostgreSQL (Aurora)
  • Elasticsearch / OpenSearch
  • Redis
Design
  • C4 model
  • ADR
  • DesignDoc
Process
  • Scrum
  • Kanban
  • XP
  • TDD
  • Feature Toggle
  • Release Train
AI dev
  • Claude Code
  • Cursor
  • Devin
  • GitHub Copilot

Links