Jono Mingard

After leaving Japan to be the first remote manager-level employee at ICHIGO, I've been focusing on technical management such as architectural work, mentoring and technical debt. I've also continued building some of the most time-sensitive or financially critical features.

This has been an opportunity to reflect on my technical decisions and work on improving the system structure, maintainability and team understanding.

After being promoted from full-stack developer to the company's first Engineering Manager, I supported and grew the development and design teams from a total of 6 to more than 20 staff.

I was still very hands on doing development work and leading the development of complex new features and projects, for example

• Implementing a real-time network architecture and instant camera streaming for ICHIGO's online crane game app TokyoCatch (Node.js + TypeScript).
• Overhauling the company's central shipping system to offset the impact of COVID-19, including building a paid shipping fee system and DHL shipping integration from scratch in the space of a few days.

Until August 2022 I was the only manager in the engineering team, so I oversaw the development and maintenance of ICHIGO's entire suite of products (multiple subscription boxes such as TokyoTreat and YumeTwins, the ecommerce site JapanHaul, the online crane game TokyoCatch, and the internal shipping system which brings them all together). I had wide ranging responsibilities such as Agile management of multiple new projects, people management and mentoring, so I picked up a lot of new skills and matured a lot in my approach to work.