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I found inspiration for this pitcher's glaze design in the night sky. Whenever I feel lost, I know I can always look up and be under the same night sky, no matter where I am. Whenever I feel alone, I know I can always look up and feel connected to humanity, everyone else looking up at the same sky. Whenever I feel all is lost, the vast darkness in the night sky reminds me there are so many possibilities out there that I haven't even thought of yet. My studio practice is on a partial pause for an unknown amount of time right now; every piece I make is stuck in the greenware stage as I continue to save up to buy kilns and build out the glaze and kiln area. In some moments, this pause feels like a rare opportunity to take time to make more experimental and labor intensive pieces, but in other moments, I am overwhelmed by the feeling that pieces without a completion timeline on the horizon are just not worth doing. It's easy to bask in fleeting bursts of inspiration; it's harder to push through the periods where nothing feels worth doing. It's especially when the waves of anxiety about the unknown future of my studio practice and the waves of anxiety about the direction of the US government and the future of my country come at me at the same time. I try to ground myself, to keep myself from spiraling. I name things I can see, smell, hear. At night, I look to the dark sky. When I can, I reread Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark: Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes–you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It's the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone. May we all find hope in the dark and choose to act.
When I was glazing this v60-style cone, I was thinking of rising sea levels, eroding beaches, and melting ice caps. Trying to tackle large challenges like climate change is overwhelming in the best of times, and these are not the best of times. There are many things we can personally do to reduce our carbon footprints and fight climate change, but If we want to have any chance to succeed, we need to join together and organize. If you're new to organizing, connect with local groups already doing the work you're interested in, and don't forget to look for groups pushing for change outside of just the national stage. Creating more dense walkable, transit-oriented communities is one of our strongest tools for a sustainable, climate friendly future. Generally, the bulk this work in the US happens at the state and local levels. In addition to the climate benefits, it's essential work to keep communities together and fight displacement. I personally spend a lot of my spare time organizing locally around this issue to help ensure NYC and New York State stay places everyone can thrive. I focus especially on pro-housing policies and improving transportation options and reliability so climate-friendly, less car-dependent lifestyles - and New York's relative safety - can be for everyone.
Clay shrinks as it dries and even more as it's fired, so it's useful to have a way to estimate the final size of in-progress work - especially if you're making multiples or trying to fit pieces together. One way to do this is with shrinkage rulers. I figured I'd design my own shrinkage rulers and provide a way for folks to make them themselves since ceramic tool costs can add up. To make your shrinkage rulers: Download either the colorful printable shrinkage rulers or black and white printable shrinkage rulers. Print at 100% size. (These files are both 400 dpi.) Verify that the 0% shrinkage standard ruler at the top matches the size of an existing regular ruler you have. This quick calibration step will make sure nothing out of scale during printing! Cut out your rulers. Optionally, laminate or cover in packing tape to help them last longer. To use your shrinkage rulers: If you're using commercial clay, look up how much your clay is estimated to shrink. If you're using a blend of clays or custom clays, you'll have to calculate how much your clay shrinks. An easy way to do this is measure the length of a wet piece right after you form them and again after it's been through its glaze firing. You can then calculate the estimated shrinkage rate: Pick the shrinkage ruler that corresponds to your clay's shrinkage rate. If you're between shrinkage rates, you can estimate with a nearby size. Remember that shrinkage rates are estimates, and a piece's actual shrinkage depends on many variables, including how wet your clay is and how close it is to it's original composition (this can change with repeated recycling). Measure your wet piece with the shrinkage ruler! The length shown is the expected length your piece's dimension will be when fired. The fine print: Reminder that shrinkage rulers only give estimated lengths! You're welcome to print these shrinkage rulers for yourself or your business. You may use the printed shrinkage rulers privately, even in commercial applications (I hope they help your ceramic art and business!), provided you do not redistribute or resell the shrinkage rulers themselves in any form, digital or physical. Footnotes If you're working on a jar or something else that needs to fit together tightly, it's better not to rely on shrinkage rulers to get a perfect fit. In my experiences, you ideally want to make the vessel and the lid as close in time as possible and have them dry together and fire together through as many phases as possible.↩
I'm continuing my clay body reviews series with two very heavily grogged "sculpture" clays I've used. Note that I currently practice in a community studio that glaze fires to cone 6 in oxidation, so my observations reflect that. Standard 420 Sculpture: Cone 6: average shrinkage 8.0%, absorption 1.5% Light straw when fired to cone 6: more yellow/beige than most white stonewares so the color is something to consider in your final vision (or engobe in something else) So much grog that it’s best described as working with wet sand, non-derogatory I've made complicated open coil-based structures with this clay that have been formed across many studio sessions over a couple days, and they've survived without cracking! Wet clay attaches readily to leather hard and even slightly dry clay. Wrapping my works in dry cleaning bags until done and dry before bisque was enough - I was worried I'd have to make a damp box, but not with this clay! The grog is white and grey, and it comes in a variety of sizes, including some that is visually rather large. The grog really shows if you sand to smooth the surface. I typically dislike how this looks - the result ends up looking more like concrete than clay. If you use this for functional ware or anything you move around a lot, you'll certainly want to sand the bottom since the groggy surface is extra rough to protect tables and counters. Burnishing alone doesn't usually make this clay smooth. Can be thrown when very soft, but your hands will feel scratched if you're not used to it! Angled slab joins join readily, and support coils press in quickly and easily. Some members of my studio prefer to make plates with this clay because the high level of grog significantly reduces warping. I personally prefer to make plates with clays with far less grog that I dry very slowly. High palpable grog content means a weaker object, and I prefer more strength in objects that are handled frequently. Can be marbled with 798, but needs to dry slowly. Standard 420's straw color shows in the unglazed section of this planter's drip tray, and there's also some flashing from the glaze near the edges. I sanded the base of this piece so the slightly rough surface of Standard 420 wouldn't scratch tables, and you can see the contrast between the sanded bottom (outside) layer where the varied grogs are revealed and the rougher surfaces of the other layers where they are still covered by clay particles. This handbuilt planter was made of Standard 798 over multiple studio sessions. The sculptural coil structures attached readily with my regular slip and score process, and it dried evenly enough to not crack with my regular process of drying under a single plastic dry-cleaning bag. This coiled wall art piece was made out of equal parts Standard 112 and Standard 420 wedged fully together. There's still ample grog in this hybrid clay body to work the same as the Standard 798 planter's coiled structure. Standard 798 Black Sculpture: Cone 6: average shrinkage 10%, absorption 1.0% Dark brown when wet, fires to a gorgeous black at cone 6 when unglazed. Clear glazes will make this clay look brown, so you need to use a black like Coyote Black or Amaco Obsidian to preserve the black color if you want to glaze it. So much grog that it’s best described as working with wet sand, non-derogatory. The grog is white, and provides a lovely contrast when on the surface or sanded to be revealed. Like 420, you'll probably want to sand the bottom of anything you'll pick up and put down more than once. Very similar working qualities to 420 - a true joy for handbuilding! Can be marbled with 420, but needs to dry slowly.
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Have you thought about doing the opposite of whatever you're doing or considering? It's a really helpful way to test your assumptions and your values. What does the opposite look like, how would it work? It's so easy to get stuck in a groove of what works, what you believe to be right. But helpful assumptions have a half-life, just like facts. And it's ever so easy to miss the shift when circumstances change, if you're not regularly stress-testing your core beliefs. That doesn't mean you're just a flag in the wind, blowing whichever way. But it does mean having enough intellectual humility and creative flexibility to consider that what you believe to be true about your business, about your team, about your technology might not be so. We did this a while back with full-time managers. We'd been working for nearly two decades without any, but exactly because it'd been so long, we were drawn to try the opposite, just to see what we might have missed. So we did. Hired a few full-time managers to help us test that assumption for a few years. In the end, we decided that our managers-of-one culture worked better, but it wasn't a given at the outset. To try the opposite, you really have to believe that you might have been wrong. Because you're wrong about something. I guarantee it. We all are.
When interviewing with a Japanese company, you’ll naturally want to know: “Is this a good place to work?” And while Glassdoor is the standard in English-speaking countries for employees leaving online reviews, the site is only rarely used in Japan, and then primarily by non-Japanese workers. Many countries have a culture that endorses directly reviewing employers in an open, public environment—Japan does not. However, there are still sites where you can find important information on your potential employer. What to watch out for In particular, you want to avoid signing on with a company that engages in exploitative practices—or as they’re known in Japan, a “black company” (ブラック企業, burakku kigyou). The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare has a FAQ describing what defines these companies: Imposing extremely long working hours with high quotas. Recognition of workers’ rights is low throughout the company; unpaid overtime and/or workplace bullying (パワハラ, pawahara) are common. The company assigns shifts to workers without consent. The company discriminates among workers in the above circumstances. In a 2023 survey, those who had worked for such toxic companies listed high turnover rates as the most common sign that something was wrong, followed by long working hours and unpaid overtime. As you examine online review sites and other sources, look for clues such as: Turnover rate: how long do employees typically stay? Internal promotion: can you see employees rising in the ranks? Upper management: are there any non-Japanese employees in management positions? Recent company announcements: do they often make sudden pivots in their business policies? If you discover, for example, that the company can’t retain employees, shows no history of internal promotions, and has just issued a return-to-office order out of the blue, it’s safe to assume you don’t want to work there. OpenWork OpenWork, also known as Vorkers, hosts over 19 million company reviews. The reviews are represented in a radar chart for easy visual reference, and are also broken down into different categories, such as work-life balance, the ease of working for women, and reasons for considering quitting. In addition, applicants can post questions for employees to answer. If you don’t speak Japanese, the site is still readable with Google Translate. You’ll need to make a free account to see all of the information, but much of it is accessible even without an account. Other Japanese sites JobTalk and Engage Hyouban are other Japanese-language review sites. JobTalk contains 4.4 million reviews of around 230,000 different companies, and Engage Hyouban boasts 30 million reviews for 220,000 companies. Neither of these sites offer as much information on tech companies in Japan as OpenWork does. If you’re applying to a large company such as Rakuten, you may find some additional reviews there, but many of TokyoDev’s clients are smaller companies that aren’t listed at all. Google Maps Reviews An unusual but occasionally helpful place to find company reviews is on Google Maps. If you search for a business’s main corporate office location—usually in Tokyo—you will sometimes find reviews written by current or former employees. Whether these reviews are high-quality or trustworthy is another matter. Rakuten, for example, has reviews with a range of opinions. Cybozu, by contrast, mostly has reviews from those who would like to work for the company but currently don’t. Still, the reviews of its corporate office are consistently positive, so you can at least get an impression of the physical environment. LinkedIn “If you’re worried that a company might be a poor place to work, try contacting current or past employees via LinkedIn,” suggested Paul McMahon, founder of TokyoDev. “This probably works best if you’re late in the hiring process.” You can send a connect request saying, ‘I’ve received an offer from company X, and want to confirm what it’s really like to work there as an engineer. Mind if I ask you a couple of questions?’ Whether or not they respond, you can still glean good information from the profiles of past and current employees. Check to see if developers tend to leave the company quickly, for example, or how long the average employee goes before being promoted. You should keep in mind though that LinkedIn is not popular in Japan, for several good reasons. If you are applying to a primarily Japanese company, many of your future coworkers won’t be active there, which means you still may not be getting a complete picture. TokyoDev In 2020, TokyoDev began interviewing developers in order to provide a more complete, boots-on-the-ground picture of daily life at specific companies. Our Developer Stories feature interviews with developers at top Japanese tech companies, who share details about both their specific jobs and the general work environment. The goal is to give applicants a good sense of how a company operates on a day-to-day basis, from the perspective of those on the inside. So far, TokyoDev has interviewed developers from Mercari, PayPay, Givery, HENNGE, KOMOJU, and more. In addition, TokyoDev’s job board is a selective one, listing only companies that we feel good about sending applicants to. In the rare event that employees later reach out with poor reviews of a business, if those reports can be confirmed, then TokyoDev will end its relationship with that company. Conclusion In short, the answer to the question “Is there a Japanese equivalent to Glassdoor?” is, “Not really.” However, by combining some of the alternatives—OpenWork, LinkedIn, TokyoDev, and perhaps even Google Maps—you can gather enough information to decide whether you want to work with a particular Japanese company. You could also ask fellow developers in our Discord. Curious about working in Japan in general? See our articles on the subject, as well as moving to Japan, living in Japan, starting a business in Japan, and more.
I’ve spent so much time, had so many headaches, and encountered so much complexity from what, in my estimation, boils down to this: trying to get something to work on multiple computers. It might be time to just go back to having one computer — a personal laptop — do everything. No more commit, push, and let the cloud build and deploy. No more making it possible to do a task on my phone and tablet too. No more striving to make it possible to do anything from anywhere. Instead, I should accept the constraint of doing specific kinds of tasks when I’m at my laptop. No laptop? Don’t do it. Save it for later. Is it really that important? I think I’d save myself a lot of time and headache with that constraint. No more continuous over-investment of my time in making it possible to do some particular task across multiple computers. It’s a subtle, but fundamental, shift in thinking about my approach to computing tasks. Today, my default posture is to defer control of tasks to cloud computing platforms. Let them do the work, and I can access and monitor that work from any device. Like, for example, publishing a version of my website: git commit, push, and let the cloud build and deploy it. But beware, there be possible dragons! The build fails. It’s not clear why, but it “works on my machine”. Something is different between my computer and the computer in the cloud. Now I’m troubleshooting an issue unrelated to my website itself. I’m troubleshooting an issue with the build and deployment of my website across multiple computers. It’s easy to say: build works on my machine, deploy it! It’s deceivingly time-consuming to take that one more step and say: let another computer build it and deploy it. So rather than taking the default posture of “cloud-first”, i.e. push to the cloud and let it handle everything, I’d rather take a “local-first” approach where I choose one primary device to do tasks on, and ensure I can do them from there. Everything else beyond that, i.e. getting it to work on multiple computers, is a “progressive enhancement” in my workflow. I can invest the time, if I want to, but I don’t have to. This stands in contrast to where I am today which is if a build fails in the cloud, I have to invest the time because that’s how I’ve setup my workflow. I can only deploy via the cloud. So I have to figure out how to get the cloud’s computer to build my site, even when my laptop is doing it just fine. It’s hard to make things work identically across multiple computers. I get it, that’s a program not software. And that’s the work. But sometimes a program is just fine. Wisdom is knowing the difference. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
For the past week, I've been working off the Minisforum UM870. A tiny mini PC with an 8-core/16-thread AMD 8745H CPU, which retails for $343 (or €379) as a bare-bone unit, and stays below $550, even after adding 48GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. I'm shocked to report that I really don't need more than this! I mean, I knew that Apple's Mac Mini, which is equally petite to the Minisforum, had plenty of power for macOS. But somehow I thought Apple had some special sauce that made this possible, and that PCs were forever condemned to be bigger, louder, and slower. How 2020 of me. The UM870 is a little beast. It runs our full HEY test suite in just 2m28s. In comparison, it takes a 14-core M4 Pro 2m49s, and such an Apple costs $2,199, once you've given it 48GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Now, that M4 Mac Mini can probably do things with, say, 8K video editing that the UM870 can't touch. But on the other hand, the UM870 can play the latest video games. Everything from Fortnite to Cyberpunk 2077 to Forza Horizon. It won't trouble a modern, dedicated Nvidia card for max FPS, but it's perfectly playable at 1080p at medium settings in a ton of games. In raw CPU power, the AMD 8745H will match a regular M4 in multi-core. They both clock in right around 13,000 points on Geekbench 6. Though the M4 is a fair bit quicker in single-core. The AMD is also far behind an M4 Pro in raw multi-core power (13K vs 22K), but at less than a quarter the cost, it's hard to complain. But as with the example of video games, it's often deceiving just to compare the Geekbench numbers, because it all depends on what you're doing. If you're really into video games, it's no use to have extra grunt, if your favorite games won't run. The same is true if you're a developer working with Docker containers and a Linux toolchain. As quoted above, the UM870 handily defeats the M4 Pro in our all-cores-buzzing HEY test suite. That's partly because we run databases and accessories, like MySQL, Redis, and ElasticSearch, in Docker containers. Even though we run the Ruby code natively on both platforms, the Docker dependencies put the Mac further behind than it otherwise would have been, because Linux runs Docker natively, and the Mac has to deal with the file-system tax and other drawbacks. The irony is that it was partly Apple's volume with and investment in TSMC that got us these incredible AMD chips, as they're riding the same improvements in TSMC manufacturing prowess as Apple's M chips. The Zen 4 cores in the 8745H are all forged on the same 5nm process as the M2, so it's no surprise that the AMD cores are dead-on-the-money for Apple's in Geekbench single-core performance. And Zen 4 is even the last generation! The insane new (and insanely named) AMD Ryzen AI Max 395+ chip that's used in the upcoming Framework Desktop runs on Zen 5 cores. And with 16 of those, the 395+ is faster in Geekbench multi-core than an M4 Pro, and only ever so slightly behind the M4 Max. On my HEY test suite, it completes the run in an insane 1m21s — more than twice as fast as the 14-core M4 Pro! But I digress. The 395+ chip isn't cheap, even if it's still a great deal. The Framework Desktop with 64GB/1TB, which is twice as fast as the M4 Pro with our HEY tests, is $1,744. That's still less than the $2,199 Mac Mini, which only has 48GB of RAM. But obviously way more than a $550 Minisforum! And while it's quite small, it's not tiny, like the UM870. Regardless, this is what I love about technology. I love when our assumptions are tested: just how small and cheap can an awesome developer machine become? I love that open-source Linux is able to run laps around Apple in the workloads that many developers need (like working with Docker containers). I love that this tiny little silent $550 mini PC on my desk is capable of putting out computing power that only a decade ago would have been reserved to loud, honking metal in a data center. Mini PCs have gotten really good. AMD is on a roll. Linux is a blast. These are my conclusions. Check out the Minisforum UM870 or the Beelink SER8. Anything with an AMD 7745H and up to an 8945HS should be a great deal. If you want to splurge (yet still get a bargain compared to the macs), you could have a look at the new HX370 in the Beelink SER9 or Minisforum X1, but I'd save my money, buy a Lofree Flow84 keyboard to go with the new mini rig, and put the rest of the money towards a KEF LSX II savings fund!
