Ed Andersen

I’m a software developer from the UK. I graduated in 2009 and but had already moved to Japan before I even got my degree certificate in the post. 2008 wasn’t a good time to find graduate roles in the UK as there was a little bit of a crash going on.

After a couple of rough starts trying to find decent dev work in Japan, my career got properly going at Medidata Solutions in Tokyo as a Senior Software Engineer. There I wrangled the original version of Medidata Rave, their flagship clinical trial EDC system, into an app capable of multi-tenancy and replaced the original WebForms user interface with a (for the time) modern ASP.NET MVC UI, making the system “cloud ready” way back in 2013.

Along the way I had got married and in 2014 my wife and I had our first son. Suddenly with responsibilities and because a technical career in Japan is basically a career on “hard mode”, we moved back to the UK and I joined KPMG UK in London as a Lead Developer.

At KPMG UK’s then “Custom Apps” team, then renamed to “Digital and Mobile Solutions”, then renamed to the “Solutions and Digital” group, I led and built a dev team in the London office up to 20 whilst doing consulting software projects for clients such as McLaren, HSBC and Tesco. As well us welcoming our second son, I got promoted to “Senior Manager” and moved to Manchester where we bought our first house. I continued to grow a new dev team up in Manchester and we reached 10 or so developers in KPMG’s dedicated “Innovation Centre” office.

Things were going great until 2020 came around and it was pretty clear consulting was going to take a big hit in response to world events. I found myself back at a small ISV software company in Manchester where I began modernising their stack.

Now, part of the “deal” of moving back to the UK was that we would visit Japan every year, and that we did. However after two vacations back to Japan being cancelled in 2020 and 2021, it became clear that somebody “changed the deal”. We made the decision to sell everything and move back to Japan permanently, and we did so in 2022.

Professionally I spent the first couple of years back in Japan helping an international trading company where I hired a dev team and sorted them out with a brand new real time trading software built on Microsoft Orleans. During that time we constructed our dream home in my wife’s hometown near Nagoya city and that is where I now live with my wife and two sons.

As of 2024, I’ve returned to consulting in my role as a Principal Developer and Consultant in Tokyo. Reach out if you would like me to work with you 😊

Thanks for reading.