We are discussing about Hacker Culture at an Internet Company. 1) History of IT industry 2) OSS 3) Hacker Culture http://d.hatena.ne.jp/hyoshiok/20140423/p1

1. Hiro Yoshioka, Technical Managing Officer,!
Rakuten, Inc.!
!
http://www.slideshare.net/hyoshiok/hacker-
culture-at-an-internet-company-20140423!
!
Hacker Culture at an
Internet Company.!
文明塾 2014/4/23!

2. 2
Agenda
• Hacker Culture at an Internet
Company

3. 3
• Be a Hacker.
• Make the world a better place.

4. 4
• The future is already here — it's
just not very evenly distributed.
by William Gibson

5. 5
Agenda
• History of IT Industry, Internet
and Hackers
– OSS
– Hacker Culture
– Community, Engineer’s career

6. 6
whoami
Name: Hiro Yoshioka
Title: Technical Managing Officer
Company: Rakuten, Inc
2009 – present
My mission: Empower Our
Engineers
Twitter: @hyoshiok
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/hyoshiok
(Diary in Japanese)
http://someday-join-us.blogspot.jp/
(in English)

7. 7
whoami
Name: Hiro Yoshioka
2009-present, Rakuten
2000-2008, Miracle Linux, CTO
2002-2003, OSDL board member
1994-2000, Oracle
1984-1994, DEC
1984 Keio University (MS)
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/
linux.git/commit/?
id=c22ce143d15eb288543fe9873e1c5ac1c01b69a1

8. 8
Who are we?
l Rakuten, Inc.
l Internet services company
l Founded : Feb. 7th 1997, Tokyo, Japan
l The first service: Rakuten Ichiba (shopping mall)

9. 9
Who are we?

10. 10
Rakuten in Japan

11. 11
Rakuten Eagles is No. 1
http://event.rakuten.co.jp/campaign/eagles/group/

12. 12
History of IT industry
• Mainframe
• PC
• Internet
• Mobile Internet

13. 13
50th anniversary
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/system360/impacts/
IBM System/360 Mainframe Computer

14. 14
IBM PC. 1981
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_PC_5150.jpg

15. 15
IT industry
• Vertical Integration – by ’80’s
– Mainframe
• Horizontal – from ‘80’s
– PC, Open Systems
• Internet, ‘90’s
– Open Source Software – from 1998
– Web 2.0, 2005
• Mobile Internet, ’00’s

16. 16
History of IT industry
• Mainframe
– IBM
• PC
– Microsoft, Intel
• Internet
– Yahoo, Amazon, Google,
• Mobile Internet
– Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon

17. 17
• Internet changes everything.
– The World is Flat.
– Open Source Software
– Hacker Mind
http://www.rakuten.co.jp/recruit/engineer/hackermind.html

18. 18
OSS – Open Source Software
• 1998, Opened Netscape’s
browser source code
• Open Source Software
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_(mascotte)

19. 19
Why Open?
• Open or Close
– Intellectual Property
• Patent
• Copyright
• Trademark

20. 20
OSS
• Value
– Freedom of Software
– Global software development model
• Evolution of software by
collaboration
• Cathedral and Bazaar
– Eric Raymond, 1997

21. 21
Bazaar
• Software Development Model
• Engagement
– Users become Developers
• Develop by Community
– individual vs. organization
– volunteers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Laad_Bazaar.jpg

22. 22
OSS Community
• Typical OSS community
– Charisma, top programmers (e.g., Matsumoto san
(Ruby), Linus Torvalds (Linux))
– Committers (top notch programmers who have the right
to add/modify the OSS)
– Contributors (programmers who submit bug fixes, new
proposals, patches)
– Casual users (report bugs, ask questions, etc)
committers
charisma
contributors
casual users
Matz
Yugui
Linus
Greg K Hartman
http://commons.wikimedia.org/
wiki/File%3AGreg_Kroah-
Hartman_lks08.jpg

23. 23
Linux
• Commits 491K+
• Contributors 12K+
• Lines of code 16M+
• License GPL v2
• http://www.ohloh.net/p/linux
3/24/2014
Example of commit.
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?
id=c22ce143d15eb288543fe9873e1c5ac1c01b69a1

24. 24
Moore’s Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
• Computers are getting cheaper
Transistor is double every 18 to 24 months

25. 25
The Mythical Man-Month
http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/The-Mythical-Man-Month-Essays/
book-5XViaJPL_UeFtLEagIcF9A/page1.html
Frederick Brooks, JR.
Brooks’ Law "adding
manpower to a late software
project makes it later”
The father of OS/360.

26. 26
Human Centric
• Engineers make Services and
Software.
– Computers are getting cheaper by
Moor’s law
– Software Development is governed
by Brooks’s law.
• Hackers make the Internet.

27. 27
Hacker Culture
• Common Value

28. 28
Hacker Ethics
• Access to computers should be unlimited and total.
• All information should be free
• Mistrust authority – promote decentralization
• Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not
criteria such as degrees, age, race, sex, or position
• You can create art and beauty on a computer
• Computers can change your life for the better
• Levy, Steven. (1984, 2001). Hackers: Heroes of the
Computer Revolution (updated edition). Penguin.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/729

29. 29
Hacker Culture, Common Value
• Computers can change your life for the better
• rough consensus and working code
• http://www.ietf.org/tao.html
• If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much
easier to apologize than it is to get permission.
By Grace Hopper

30. 30
Internet, Joichi Ito
• The ethos of the Internet
• everyone should have the freedom to
connect, to innovate, to program, without
asking permission.
• No one can know the whole of the network, and
by design it cannot be centrally controlled.
• This network was intended to be decentralized,
its assets widely distributed. Today most
innovation springs from small groups at its
“edges.”
• http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/joichi-ito-innovating-
by-the-seat-of-our-pants.html?_r=2&

31. 31
What Happened to Yahoo, Paul Graham
• In 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google
didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about
being a technology company.
• Which companies need to have a hacker-centric
culture?
• Any company that needs to have good
software.
• http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

32. 32
What Happened to Yahoo, Paul Graham
• Good programmers want to work at hacker-
centric culture.
• Without good programmers you won’t get good
software.
• http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

33. 33
The Hacker Way (Facebook)
IPO 2012
• Code wins arguments
• Continuous Improvement and Iteration
• Open and Meritocratic
• Hackathon
• Bootcamp
• http://www.wired.com/business/2012/02/zuck-
letter/

34. 34
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/jasonoberholtzer/files/
2011/06/Talent_traffic.gif

35. 35
Hacker-centric Culture
• Software Development in Internet Age
• Hire good programmers
• Good programmers want to work with
good programmers at hacker centric
culture
• Build good work place
• Good programmers make good services

36. 36
Web 2.0
• The Web As Platform
• Harnessing Collective Intelligence
• Data is the Next Intel Inside
• End of Software Release Cycle
• Lightweight Programming Models
• Software Above the Level of a Single Device
• Rich User Experience
• http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html 9/30/2005
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Web_2.0_Map.svg

37. 37
Netscape vs Google
• A native web application, never sold or
packaged, but delivered as a service
• None of the trappings of the old software
industry are present.
• No scheduled software releases, just continuous
improvement.
• No licensing or sale, just usage.
• No porting to different platforms, …, just a
massively scalable collection of commodity
PCs running OSS operating systems plus
homegrown applications and utilities that no
one outside the company ever gets to see.http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html

38. 38
Community
• Seminar, meetings, conference,

39. 39
IT Seminar Calendar of Japan
http://bit.ly/QmRFiS more than 300 meetings/month

40. 40
Conferences in Japan
http://ll.jus.or.jp/2013/
http://phpcon.php.gr.jp/w/2012/
http://yapcasia.org/2013/
http://2012.pycon.jp/index.html
http://nodefest.jp/2012/ http://rubykaigi.org/2013
http://connpass.com/event/2253/?disp_content=presentation#tabs

41. 41
Conference
• Running by volunteers
• Inexpensive, e.g., 5000 yen/day ($50/day)
• Numbers attendees; more than 100 - 1000
• Sharing technical knowledge and networking
• Beer Bash or Drinking Party (optional)
• Examples, LL event, PHP Conference, YAPC (Yet
another perl conference), RubyKaigi, Tokyo Node
Gakuen (Javascript)

42. 42
cf. Commercial Conference
• Running by corporation
• Expensive, e.g., $300-$500/day
• Numbers attendees; more than 1000
• Sharing technical knowledge and networking
• Party (optional)
• Examples, OSCON $2045 (5 days),
http://www.oscon.com/oscon2013

43. 43
Volunteer driven meetups, conference
• Good Points
• Organizer; You can organize what you want.
• Contents, speakers, date, time, place, fee
• Presenters; You can share your idea.
• Participants;
• Bad Points
• You need to do everything. (You may have help
from community)

44. 44
Sustainable meetups, conference
• Value of meetup > Cost of meetups
• Increase value
• Decrease cost

45. 45
Self Introduction
• Ethnography 民族誌
• a branch of anthropology dealing with the
scientific description of individual cultures.

46. 46
Ethnography, computer industry
• Field study of Computer Industry instead of
undeveloped region.
• Understand corporate culture
• Describe corporate culture
• Develop better corporate culture
• Corporate culture is difficult to understand
from outside

47. 47
Ethnography
• The Soul of New Machine（超マシン誕生）
• Show Stopper（闘うプログラマ）
• i-mode 事件
• Engineering Culture（洗脳するマネジメント）
• Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
（ハッカーズ）

48. 48
whoami
Name: Hiro Yoshioka
2009-present, Rakuten
2000-2008, Miracle Linux, CTO
2002-2003, OSDL board member
1994-2000, Oracle
1984-1994, DEC

49. 49
Digital Equipment Corporation
• Corporate Culture
• The first company gives you strong
impressions…
• Computer vendor, 2nd largest, 1957-90’s
• Acquired by Compaq in 1998, merged with HP
in 2002

50. 50
Digital Equipment Corporation
• Corporate Culture
• Midnight project
• internal computer network
• information sharing

51. 51
Hacker-centric Culture
• Why do we need it?
• Common Good
• Competitiveness
• Best practice

52. 52
Hacker-centric Culture
• Why do we need it for me?
• It is fun.
• Reasons
• Common good (make better world)
• Competitiveness (win a competition)
• Best practice (increase productivity)

53. 53
How do we foster it?
• Corporate culture is developed by implicit and
explicit way
• Only insiders know it

54. Socialization
共同化
Externalization
表出化
Combination
連結化
Internalization
内面化
Tacit/暗黙知 Tacit
Explicit
Explicit
Tacit
Tacit
Explicit/形式知 Explicit
Challenge of a Global Knowledge-Creating Organization
Ø 共同化（Socialization） This process focuses tacit to tacit.
Ø 表出化（Externalization） This process focuses tacit to explicit. knowledge.
Ø 連結化（Combination） Knowledge transforms from explicit to explicit.
Ø 内面化（Internalization） Tacit knowledge is created using explicit knowledge and shared across the organization.
Knowledge needs to move from “Tacit to Explicit” and “Explicit to Tacit”
This is especially hard for Global Companies!

55. 55
How do we foster it?
• Tacit (implicit) Knowledge
• material: manager, mentor, colleagues
• methods: work, job, study sessions, lunch,
drinking, hackerthons, SNS, …
• Explicit Knowledge
• strategy, guideline, rule, procedure, tools

56. 56
How do we foster it?
• Tacit (implicit) Knowledge
• Super Sale live on Enterprise SNS

57. 57
Corporate Community
• Community of practice
• Organization: Vertical
• Project: Horizontal
• Community: Not Vertical, Not
Horizontal
• sharing value

58. 58
The Hacker Way (Facebook)
• Code wins arguments
• Continuous Improvement and Iteration
• Open and Meritocratic
• Hackathon
• Bootcamp
• http://www.wired.com/business/2012/02/zuck-
letter/

59. 59
The Hacker Way (Facebook)
• Hackathon
• Demo or Die
• Pizza and Beer
at Yammer, 10/28/’12

60. 60
• How to be a good Engineer (specialist)?
• Learn how to learn
• knowledge is less important than skill
• Be lifetime learner
http://learningpatterns.sfc.keio.ac.jp/

61. 61
Rakuten
• Learning
• Global Experience Program
• International (oversea) Technical
Conference
• Hands on Trainings
• Techtalks, internal seminars
• Technology Conference

62. Global training
Training is very important.
SF Agile Development Center
DU members
■SF Agile Development Center training
【The number of participants】6 employees
【Training period 】25 Sep 2011 – 15 Dec 2011

63. DU’ve promoted Globalization : GEP/OSC/
Englishnization
GEP: 8 trainings, 28 trainees.
OSC: 140 conferences, 468 members
2012 result
,17 countries.
As part of it,
DAD’ve helped GEP,
OSC and EP
program.
Last year, DU sent many people to
overseas.

64. 64
Community
• Collaboration tools (Wiki, bug tracking
system)
• Techtalks, informal seminar
• Technology Conference

65. 65
Tech Talk ?
• Informal technical talks by experts,
running by volunteer staffs

66. 66
Topics
• Tips about internal tools
– Wiki, Network Tools, JIRA,
Confluence, git, …
• New technologies
– Mobile Applications, PaaS,
agile software
development, HTML5,

67. 67
Rakuten Technology Conference
• Annual conference since 2007
• All sessions are in English (2012)
• industries’ experts and employees
sessions
• Oct 25th, 2014
http://tech.rakuten.co.jp/

68. 68
• Internet changes everything.
– The World is Flat.
– Open Source Software
– Hacker Mind
http://www.rakuten.co.jp/recruit/engineer/hackermind.html

69. ENGLISHNIZATION

70. IT’S ONLY ENGLISH
http://books.rakuten.co.jp/rb/11693605/

71. Employee
Grade
Not Reached
(RED)
Not Reached
(YELLOW)
Not Reached
(ORANGE)
Reached Target
（GREEN）
AAA -550 551-650 651-749 750-
AA -500 501-600 601-699 700-
A -450 451-550 551-649 650-
BBB -400 401-500 501-599 600-
BB -400 401-500 501-599 600-
B -400 401-500 501-599 600-
RED ZONE: More than 200 points away from target
YELLOW ZONE: Between 100-199 points away from target
ORANGE ZONE: Between 1 – 99 points away from target
GREEN ZONE: Score meets or exceeds target
ZONE DEFINITION

72. ZONE STATUS
29%
9%
11%
14%
36%
87%
8%
4%
5%
A
M
J
M
J
A
S
O
N
D
J
2011
2012
F
M
16%
19%
20% 19% 17% 15% 13% 10% 7% 6% 6%
1%
A
As of June 30th, 2012
42% 45% 48% 49% 51% 53% 54% 56% 58% 60% 63% 66%
Data: Ranten, Inc (Total may not equal 100% due to rounding)
4%
72%
M
80%
2%
J
RED
GREEN
ORANGE
YELLOWNo Score

73. 651.5
672.3
687.3
694.7
645.6638.9632.6
625.3
612.7
604.3
596.3
586.9
583.6593.7
593.9
589.3
589.6
522.6
558.0537.8
526.2
500
520
540
560
580
600
620
640
660
680
700
2010/10 2010/11 2010/12 2011/1 2011/2 2011/3 2011/4 2011/5 2011/6 2011/7 2011/8 2011/9 2011/10 2011/11 2011/12 2012/1 2012/2 2012/3 2012/4 2012/5 2012/6/22
697.7
526.2
Oct-2010
June-2012
TOEIC Average score
TOEIC SCORE
Data: Rakuten, Inc.
is speaking
500
520
540
560
580
600
620
640
660
680
700
720
740
760
780
800
Oct
Nov
Dec
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
761.1
526.2
Oct. 2010
Oct. 2013
TOEIC Score progress
Amazing Progress!!

74. 74
Agenda
• History of IT Industry, Internet
and Hackers
– OSS
– Hacker Culture
– Web 2.0
– Community, Engineer’s career

75. 75
• The future is already here — it's
just not very evenly distributed.
by William Gibson

76. 76
• Be a Hacker.
• Make the world a better place.

77. 77
reference
• License
– http://www.slideshare.net/YutakaKachi/20110211
– http://handsout.jp/slide/1009
• Bazaar model
– Producing OSS http://producingoss.com/ja/
– Cathedral and Bazaar
http://cruel.org/freeware/cathedral.html
• Open Innovation
– http://books.rakuten.co.jp/rb/5913864/
– http://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/tyousakai/seisaku/
haihu07/sanko1.pdf