Rice and Chicken

How I Became a Web Developer in Japan (and Didn’t Die Trying)

Ivan Reyes's avatar
By Ivan Reyes
Feb 25, 2026

The view of Shibuya from my office

In my first article, I wanted to write about the path and the opportunities I took to get where I am right now. I don’t necessarily consider myself an example of success to be imitated, but still, if I had a time machine and traveled 10 years in the past and told myself that one day I would become a software engineer working for a large Japanese company, that I would be using Japanese on a daily basis in a professional environment, I’d either be overjoyed or suspicious because it all sounded too good to be true.

Even though I majored in an engineering field, I don’t come from a CS background, and I didn’t have much experience programming. I learned in college how to program industrial machines such as CNCs, and work with macros and formulas in Excel. And although I was good at it, I never thought about the idea of making a living out of “writing” code or “programming” stuff.

I came with a Spouse Visa after marrying my wife in Colombia. She brought all of the documents, had them translated, and legalized the marriage in Japan. She fought all of the bureaucracy and did the hard work by herself. The only thing I had to do was to bring the COE to the Japanese embassy in Bogota, wait two weeks, and boom, I had a visa to work in Japan. So, my experience might be a bit different from the rest, since I didn’t have to sweat over visa restrictions.

Once I arrived, I committed to learn Japanese, hoping to have a smooth transition into a new life in Japan. I ended up attending a Japanese School called Akamonkai in Tokyo. It was a very fun experience to be a student again. Got the chance to live in a student’s dorm room since my wife already had a job in another city in Japan. I was afraid to share a room with a complete stranger, but it turned out to be comforting to live with someone who was experiencing the same things as you for the first time.

My days consisted of attending school in the morning, and working part-time in the afternoon and night. I started doing deliveries with Uber Eats on my bicycle as a part-time job at the beginning, since you don’t need many Japanese skills to pick up orders from restaurants and deliver them to your customer’s door, and you can easily manage when to work because there are no schedules to follow. Was really tough though, some parts of Tokyo are surprisingly hilly, and sometimes the app would drag you away from home, making the ride back very long and exhausting. But overall, it was a fun way to make money; sometimes it felt like a game with real-life rewards.

I also worked in a restaurant-bar. At the beginning, when I didn’t have a grasp of the language yet, I was assigned to the kitchen, where I had to prepare the tables and clean the place before opening, prepare some ingredients so the staff at the counter could prepare dishes in front of the customers in a performative way, wash dishes, clean toilets, and prepare the store for closing. I think it was the most humbling experience of all, there were many days when I was wondering if going to college was really worth it, and if the effort my parents put into paying tuition was all going to waste if I ended up washing dishes all my life. Of course, I knew it was something temporary, but still, the heavy workload of a restaurant was really tiring and made me question myself many times. Still, I am glad I pushed myself to work in that kind of environment. I genuinely think that my Japanese improved exponentially after that close-to-a-year part-time experience.

After graduating from the language school, I began to apply for jobs at the worst time ever. Are you familiar with a worldwide pandemic that stopped the world, closed borders, locked down entire cities, and crushed economies? Well, COVID affected many people’s lives, including mine. Finding a decent job became a struggle. Desperate for stability, I accepted a job as a researcher at a TV company, but the working conditions were so deplorable and made my life so miserable that it is not even worth remembering. Working on holidays, unpaid overtime as punishment, racist comments here and there, and a very low salary; it lasted 7 months.

I remember at the time, some of my friends and acquaintances were not affected by COVID because they worked in the IT industry. It was really appealing at the moment, good salaries, the benefit of working from home, and the chance to build a career with real life skills made it look like the best place to be at that moment. I originally thought that in order to become a developer, you had to have a degree in Computer Science or some sort of education that certifies you as “qualified” to do the job. But after leaving that nightmare of a TV company, I called a friend of mine to ask him for guidance. I was actually thinking about ernolling in a 3-years 専門学校 (vocational school) but he said that he knew many folks who broke into the industry by self-studying or even by attending boot camps. He said that college only teaches you the theory, but for becoming a developer, what really matters is the ability to build things, solve problems, and keep learning consistently. He recommended me to check up a couple of bootcamps that offers english programs in Tokyo.

Now that I was out of that nightmare of having to work for a Japanese black company, I had all the time in the world that unemployment had to offer to devote myself to two things. 1. Get the Japanese Language Proficiency Test certification, and 2. Dust off my coding skills and learn the foundations of web development. I passed the JLPT N2 in December 2020 and joined a coding bootcamp in January 2021 to speedrun the process of learning the basics and getting employed as a Junior dev. It was like being a student all over again, having batchmates from all over the world made the , and the schedules of the lessons were made to make you build while you learn. The bootcamp not only taught me how to code, but it also taught me how to teach myself how to code, and it also gave me the confidence to jump into the job market with no experience whatsoever.

Before joining the bootcamp, I was worried that the tech stack seemed to be outdated. They taught Ruby as a programming language and Ruby on Rails as a framework, in a world where Python and JavaScript are the most famous languages that even someone not related to the development industry has heard about them. But I learned the basics are universal in Ruby or any language, and web app fundamentals translate across frameworks. Many batchmates landed jobs using Django, Node, or Go, proving Ruby’s foundations are transferable.

Once I finished the bootcamp, I applied to more than 100 companies, and after several interviews, thanks to the bootcamp professional network, I was able to get my first job as a Software Engineer. I remember when I got the acceptance email, I felt like Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness when he finally gets hired as a broker. It might sound like an exaggeration, but in that moment, it was the greatest professional victory of my life. Doing that bootcamp was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life, some of my buddies also followed my lead and were able to get jobs as developers. At the time, I would have definitely recommended doing it, but 2021 was a long time ago, the job market was different from what it is now, the date I am writing this, and the sudden and accelerated growth of AI has raised the bar for people who want to start a career in web development with no experience.

If you are someone who wants to get into the Industry here in Japan and has little to no experience, my advice would be: