[Easy for everyone] Lowering the barriers to personal development [Individual Development Engineer]

Hello!
I'm Sujun from the Systems Development Department.
This time,my personal projectsI'd like to write about

When I talk to various engineers in the company, I find that there are surprisingly few people who are creating something on their own, so I would like to talk about the background and mindset behind my own personal development

history

I think my first experience with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Flash was creating a personal website in high school.
I made it using only raw HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, without any frameworks. (laughs)

After that, I studied programming in the information science department, and I used what I learned to write programs for fun. I
even created and released external tools for Minecraft, using the GUI tool creation methods I learned at school as a reference. (I still get inquiries about them occasionally.)

Even now, I develop tools as a hobby in my free time, such as during breaks, after work, and after returning home

What is personal development?

When I searched for what personal development is, I found the following description:

Personal software developmenta hobby activity where software engineers use their free time to create, publish, and operate websites and smartphone applications.

I think that's generally the general perception

The benefits of personal development

The benefits of personal development include:

Self-development and skill development

Personal development allows you to improve your skills and knowledge. Working independently on different aspects of a project broadens your perspective, improves your problem-solving skills and creativity, and exposes you to architecture and design methods that are not implemented in work projects

Free renovation

Since I'm developing it on my own, I can, of course, modify it however I like. If I realize something's not right during development, I can immediately steer it in the direction I want. If I keep this process going, Ithe ultimate [tool name] that I've envisioned'll eventually create

Become a portfolio

To be honest, this may not be something you should write on a company blog, but since it's software you developed personally, you can take full credit for it and use it when looking for a job. If you say, "I created the tool by myself, uploaded it to GitHub, etc., and released it," it may be seen as a guarantee of a certain level of skill

Aren't you thinking about it a little too hard?

Creating, publishing, and managing an app...
At first glance, it seems like a rather high hurdle.

It's true that there's a tendency to revere individual developers who release their apps/services to the public for general use.
However, personally, I think we should broaden the scope and take a more relaxed approach.

the essence of itin developing it individuallyI believe

I believe that writing and running programs locally for personal use, without making them publicly available, is also a form of personal development.
Whether for internal or public use, releasing something to the public requires a lot of consideration, such as documentation organization and maintenance, which is definitely troublesome and a high hurdle...

for example…

Based on what I have created in the past, I believe the following can also be included in personal development:

Make your daily life easier

• TampermonkeyUse web browser extensions like
• customChrome extensionI use a
• Google Spreadsheet, Forms, andGASUse

Make your daily work easier

• Create editor extensions (Jetbrains,VSCode)
• Automate routine tasks in your daily work

The things engineers interact with on a daily basis are also created by engineers, and are often designed with mechanisms that make them easy to extend.
If you have any complaints or issues with your daily work, why not try tinkering with them?

Where do I start?

If we want to lower the barrier to entry for personal development as much as possible, I personallyTampermonkeythink that inserting scripts into websites using tools like
In terms of knowledge, you can create them if you know vanilla JavaScript, and in terms of what to create, I think there are many people who are dissatisfied with something in the websites they use every day.
To be more specific about what I've created myself, I've made a script with the following functions:

• Moving the buttons on the site
• Filtering what is displayed
• Show thumbnail images on mouse hover
• Insert a template string into the text area
• Format and copy page content to clipboard

It's basically like a microservice tailored to your own needs.
See? Simple, right? 🧔🏽‍♂️

Conclusion

Since this is my first blog post, I've written about my background and my hobby of programming.
In the future, I hope to share information about projects I'm currently working on personally, as well as the lessons I've learned from them.

Thank you for reading to the end!

Let's all be more relaxed about personal development!