A Journey to Nachi Falls Thank you for your unwavering support and kindness toward Dandelions over the past year. As we welcome 2025, I’m delighted to share our New Year’s wishes and hopes for the year ahead.
Nachi Shrine
Recently, I had the opportunity to visit Nachi Falls, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Nestled in the sacred Kumano region, this majestic waterfall, with its 133-meter drop and lush surroundings, left me in awe. Its powerful and endless flow reminded me of nature’s incredible strength and resilience. Standing there, I felt a profound sense of calm and renewal, paired with a determination to keep moving forward with steady, unstoppable energy, just like the falls themselves.
A New Challenge The inspiration drawn from Nachi Falls resonates deeply with our theme for the 8th phase of our journey: Health-Oriented Management and Challenges. To achieve sustainable growth, both individuals and organizations require not intermittent effort but a continuous, ever-flowing strength, much like the falls.To this end, we aim to cultivate a corporate culture that prioritizes the health and fulfillment of every employee, fostering vitality and creativity without interruption. We firmly believe that physical and mental well-being lay the foundation for generating innovative ideas, overcoming challenges, and delivering new value to society.
Nachi Falls
This year marks a significant milestone in our journey of challenges. Since our establishment in 2017, we have expanded into a variety of fields, including IT systems planning, design, and operations; e-commerce; human resource development consulting; staffing services; and job placement. Building on our past accomplishments, we aim to take a bold leap forward in 2025.
Amid the rapid wave of digital transformation, we will not only integrate ICT technologies but also harness uniquely human strengths such as creativity and empathy. By doing so, we are committed to delivering solutions that embody the essence of “Dandelions” more than ever before.
Aiming to be a Contributing Company The name “Dandelions” symbolizes resilience and growth—the ability to thrive anywhere and spread seeds of possibility far and wide. Like the steady flow of Nachi Falls, we aim to keep moving forward no matter the challenges, opening new doors and realizing new dreams.
Together, as a unified team, we’re ready to turn our vision of health and challenges into action, delivering services that bring value to our community and partners.
Nachi Mountain
In Closing Standing before Nachi Falls, I was reminded of the gift of life and the endless energy that surrounds us. Inspired by this, we will continue to grow, creating a workplace where our people can shine and contributing to the success of our customers, partners, and society.
As we step into 2025, I wish you a year filled with growth and opportunity. Thank you for your continued trust and support for Dandelions—we look forward to an exciting year ahead with you.
January 2025 Hideo Takahashi President & CEO Dandelions Co., Ltd.
Hello! I’m Ogi, responsible for this edition of our study session blog. I’m excited to share the highlights of our recent internal training session, “Low-Code Development Experience Using Outsystems Part 2”!
Check out the highlights from our previous study session here!
Building on our last session, the goal of this study meeting was to deepen our understanding of low-code development and Outsystems by gaining hands-on experience with Outsystems development. This time, we had many new members join us, making the session even more vibrant and engaging.
Here’s how the study session unfolded:
Recap of the Previous Session
Watching Educational Videos – Focus on UI Development
Hands-On Development with Outsystems
Summary and Q&A
Watching Educational Videos – Focus on UI Development
We kicked off the session by watching official educational videos provided by Outsystems. This time, the videos focused on UI development, where we learned the basics of screen widgets, variables, and client-side logic.
If you’re interested, you can watch the videos here (an Outsystems account is required).
Hands-On Development with Outsystems
After watching the videos, each participant used their own Outsystems environment to start developing. During this hands-on session, we primarily focused on:
Adding Widgets and Logic to Screen
Utilizing Aggregates ( Learn more about Aggregates here.)
Displaying Data on Screen
We experienced firsthand the unique advantages of developing with Outsystems, such as the simplicity of adding widgets through drag-and-drop and the visual manipulation capabilities provided by Aggregates for data retrieval and sorting.
Throughout the development process, we followed the instructor’s explanations and worked on our own projects, enhancing our practical skills.
While listening to the instructor’s explanations, we proceeded with development in our own environments.
Summary
In this study session, we tackled more hands-on content compared to the previous one, successfully conveying the benefits of low-code development and Outsystems. The development experience segment fostered active discussions and Q&A among the participants, further deepening our understanding.
We plan to continue hosting study sessions focused on Outsystems development in the future. Stay tuned for our next article!
Welcome to the engineering blog, where we share what we’re learning and working on daily.
As part of our employee security education efforts, we conducted a training email exercise.
What is a Training Email?
A training email involves sending employees simulated emails that mimic targeted attack emails to strengthen their ability to respond effectively. Targeted attack emails are a sophisticated technique aimed at stealing sensitive information, often directed at specific organizations or individuals.
In this training, pseudo-attack emails resembling work-related communications were sent to selected employees to evaluate whether they would open the email or its attachments.
What We Did
1. Created Realistic and Persuasive Email Content
We designed email content and subject lines that employees might open without thinking twice. The goal was to create emails that seemed plausible during the training period.
Example of training email
2. Created a Fake Virus File (Word Document)
For this exercise, we embedded a mechanism into a Word file that accessed our company-managed server when opened.
If an employee opened the attachment, the file accessed the server and logged a unique ID hidden in the document. By checking the output log, we were able to identify which employees had opened the file.
Unfortunately, a few employees did open the attachment during this exercise.
How training emails work
3. Conducted Internal Re-education
We followed up with additional internal training to reinforce measures against targeted emails and raise awareness further.
Refresher materials
Summary
This exercise helped raise employees’ security awareness. We plan to continue these efforts in the future to further improve security measures.
Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for the next edition of the engineering blog!
Thank you for reading! Today’s introduction is brought to you by Junpei, and it’s been a while since my last post.
A Recent Hobby
Lately, I’ve gotten back into Pokémon, thanks to my wife’s influence. It’s been about 20 years since I first fell in love with it back in elementary school, when Pokémon Red/Green debuted on the Game Boy. Now, the nostalgia has kicked in again after all these years.
Not long ago, Mie Prefecture’s Shima Spain Village teamed up with Pokémon for a limited-time collaboration. Naturally, I had to check it out. The park was filled with Pokémon displays everywhere, drawing crowds of all ages.
Throughout the area, Pokémon appeared at every turn!There were lines of people waiting to take photos at popular spots.
Pokémon Everywhere!
Every corner of the area featured Pokémon—and for the more popular photo spots, people were even lining up. I rediscovered old favorites I used as a kid and met new Pokémon introduced over the past two decades. Witnessing a franchise that continues to be cherished by so many people for so long made a strong impression on me.
In the IT industry, we work every day to develop systems that make a positive impact. Lately, I’ve been thinking how wonderful it would be if we could create something as universally beloved as Pokémon—something that resonates with both children and adults alike.
At Dandelions, we regularly hold “Recreation” events to deepen the camaraderie among employees!
This is “George” from Unit 3. As previously introduced in this blog, Dandelions has become a sponsor of the young lion “Regulus” at the Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens. To go see “Regulus” (and other animals) together, Unit 3 organized a recreation event—a visit to the Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens.
After the date was set for Saturday, October 19, we kept an eye on the weather forecast. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t favor us on the day—it rained, and it was unusually hot and humid for October. However, even while walking around with umbrellas, we were able to thoroughly enjoy the zoo and botanical gardens.
To make touring the zoo and botanical gardens even more interesting, we also held an animal scavenger hunt game. Participants earned points by finding specific animals, taking photos, and submitting them, with points awarded based on their rarity (difficulty of finding them). The recreation participants were divided into four teams and set out to find the animals.
Komodo Dragon (Apparently, in Japan, it can only be seen at the Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens.)Finding the Emerald Tree BoaIn Front of “Regulus”
(By the way, before going to the zoo and botanical gardens, we all had lunch together at a nearby restaurant.)
Stay tuned for the introduction of our next recreation event!
