To be one of pioneers

I joined Fsoft at 2014 and each role I took since then is an invaluable experience for me. Working here provides me opportunities to interact with multiple technology platforms which I could hardly have in anywhere else.

Above of all, most interesting frameworks came from our Japanese customers. These are very rare chances for any developers to see how programming knowledge could be organized, and combined into a framework with a very unique way. Before that, I only worked with open source frameworks or J2EE frameworks that mostly follow a common convention which we could find on the internet. On the other hand, differently from working with open source technologies, when reversed engineering such in-door frameworks of our customer, I could see that the same kind of foundation programming techniques could be structured following Japanese’s essential philosophy which is hardly to describe unless you had gone through crisis of thought before you could get a clue about what is what within it.

Hence, working with them is very challenging and exciting at the same time. There was times, customer requested us to implement a new module on their own framework created by another company with no technical documentation of any kind. It was so pushing that we had provided them 2 different workable solutions to implementing the task but none of them satisfied the customers.

Until the last hour of the final day, our 3rd solution worked and was approved by them. It was the moment of relief that I would remember for the whole of my life. Other than that, Japanese customer is very demanding that nearly each project require us to push ourselves to the limit.

Another case was a very rare case, where we had to implement a whole front end look and feel for a web application which had been using heavily for 12 years. The application was developed with utmost careful by our team, from analysis the requirement, making thorough analysis report of current project before making any modification. The CSS framework was developed by us so precise that our testers measure the height and width to a tiny pixel. Every color appeared on the web browser must be verified and taken screenshot for evidence one by one. We also implemented prototype for any specific solution and got approval from our customer before we actually implementing it, because the new UI/UX does not easily working with the old fashion of back-end which must be kept untouched.

We had tested the application for many rounds. Not only that, our customer, and the customer of our customer also tested it carefully. However, unfortunately, 2 hour before the application go live to production mode on a Saturday morning, the Technical Director from our customer discovered a major mistake that all of us was missed. That was a terrified moment, and it quickly turned into critical issue that even when we had made 5-why over and over again but customer did not easily accept. In that case, only the tolerance from our customer that kept the project going on.

All the lessons are priceless and each of that happened in a very unique way that we can only say that it continue to happen to help us grow with time. None predefined process or fore planned could define those situations, they could only prepare for us the mindset that we may apply to act properly at such.

Another characteristic of the company that I find it is tremendous valuable is that we could work at multiple locations where our company located at. It opens unlimited possibility for us to go to work at branches within Vietnam like: FTown, FComplex, Fville ... and most fascinating is going abroad to be at the world scale. For example: like in Asia we have branches in Japan, Singapore, China..., like in Europe we have branches at France, German, Slovakia… like in America we have branches USA and Canada...

Being with the company during the years helped me realize and understand the power of collective intelligent. The young developers have all the precious value to contribute to the success of projects. All they need is an opportunity to prove their ability in a right environment. Many time, I had seen customer express their proud about the product we provided to them, and appreciate our team's effort in building the product and that is the good reason for them to provide us with more projects.

It could hardly to imagine, a team with nearly all freshers had proved the capability of not only doing the outsourcing product by successfully handle the continuous development received from China's team, but also create a brand new front-end to back-end framework for our customer's new web application. But at the same time, I have a feeling that we had not done enough to provide the right kind of challenge for our members to help them reach their full potential.

In addition to that, recently, we worked with FSS to apply Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to innovate our company’s internal business procedures. Together we had developed robots with good quality, thorough tested, easy to operate, detailed guide line. It is our small contribution to advance the company into the realm of industry revolution 4.0.

Nowadays, together with my team, I'm working to build a new Business Unit one more time and I realize that working at the edge of technologies, contribute to create the innovation is my passion and luckily that it also in line with the company's strategy which is to be one of pioneers.

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FPT Software - DTL