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English version follows. Aujourd’hui, Khronos Group a sorti la spécification 1.4 de l’API graphique standard Vulkan. Le projet Asahi Linux est fier d’annoncer le premier pilote Vulkan 1.4 pour le matériel d’Apple. En effet, notre pilote graphique Honeykrisp est reconnu par Khronos comme conforme à cette nouvelle version dès aujourd’hui. Ce pilote est déjà disponible dans nos dépôts officiels. Après avoir installé Fedora Asahi Remix, executez dnf upgrade --refresh pour obtenir la dernière version du pilote. Vulkan 1.4 standardise plusieurs fonctionnalités importantes, y compris les horodatages et la lecture locale avec le rendu dynamique. L’industrie suppose que ces fonctionnalités devront être plus courantes, et nous y sommes préparés. Sortir un pilote conforme reflète notre engagement en faveur des standards graphiques et du logiciel libre. Asahi Linux est aussi compatible avec OpenGL 4.6, OpenGL ES 3.2, et OpenCL 3.0, tous conformes aux spécifications pertinentes. D’ailleurs, les notres sont les seules pilotes conformes pour le materiel d’Apple de n’importe quel standard graphique. Même si le pilote est sorti, il faut encore compiler une version expérimentale de Vulkan-Loader pour accéder à la nouvelle version de Vulkan. Toutes les nouvelles fonctionnalités sont néanmoins disponsibles comme extensions à notre pilote Vulkan 1.3 pour en profiter tout de suite. Pour plus d’informations, consultez l’article de blog de Khronos. Today, the Khronos Group released the 1.4 specification of Vulkan, the standard graphics API. The Asahi Linux project is proud to announce the first Vulkan 1.4 driver for Apple hardware. Our Honeykrisp driver is Khronos-recognized as conformant to the new version since day one. That driver is already available in our official repositories. After installing Fedora Asahi Remix, run dnf upgrade --refresh to get the latest drivers. Vulkan 1.4 standardizes several important features, including timestamps and dynamic rendering local read. The industry expects that these features will become more common, and we are prepared. Releasing a conformant driver reflects our commitment to graphics standards and software freedom. Asahi Linux is also compatible with OpenGL 4.6, OpenGL ES 3.2, and OpenCL 3.0, all conformant to the relevant specifications. For that matter, ours are the only conformant drivers on Apple hardware for any graphics standard graphics. Although the driver is released, you still need to build an experimental version of Vulkan-Loader to access the new Vulkan version. Nevertheless, you can immediately use all the new features as extensions in Vulkan 1.3 driver. For more information, see the Khronos blog post.
Gaming on Linux on M1 is here! We’re thrilled to release our Asahi game playing toolkit, which integrates our Vulkan 1.3 drivers with x86 emulation and Windows compatibility. Plus a bonus: conformant OpenCL 3.0. Asahi Linux now ships the only conformant OpenGL®, OpenCL™, and Vulkan® drivers for this hardware. As for gaming… while today’s release is an alpha, Control runs well! Installation First, install Fedora Asahi Remix. Once installed, get the latest drivers with dnf upgrade --refresh && reboot. Then just dnf install steam and play. While all M1/M2-series systems work, most games require 16GB of memory due to emulation overhead. The stack Games are typically x86 Windows binaries rendering with DirectX, while our target is Arm Linux with Vulkan. We need to handle each difference: FEX emulates x86 on Arm. Wine translates Windows to Linux. DXVK and vkd3d-proton translate DirectX to Vulkan. There’s one curveball: page size. Operating systems allocate memory in fixed size “pages”. If an application expects smaller pages than the system uses, they will break due to insufficient alignment of allocations. That’s a problem: x86 expects 4K pages but Apple systems use 16K pages. While Linux can’t mix page sizes between processes, it can virtualize another Arm Linux kernel with a different page size. So we run games inside a tiny virtual machine using muvm, passing through devices like the GPU and game controllers. The hardware is happy because the system is 16K, the game is happy because the virtual machine is 4K, and you’re happy because you can play Fallout 4. Vulkan The final piece is an adult-level Vulkan driver, since translating DirectX requires Vulkan 1.3 with many extensions. Back in April, I wrote Honeykrisp, the only Vulkan 1.3 driver for Apple hardware. I’ve since added DXVK support. Let’s look at some new features. Tessellation Tessellation enables games like The Witcher 3 to generate geometry. The M1 has hardware tessellation, but it is too limited for DirectX, Vulkan, or OpenGL. We must instead tessellate with arcane compute shaders, as detailed in today’s talk at XDC2024. Geometry shaders Geometry shaders are an older, cruder method to generate geometry. Like tessellation, the M1 lacks geometry shader hardware so we emulate with compute. Is that fast? No, but geometry shaders are slow even on desktop GPUs. They don’t need to be fast – just fast enough for games like Ghostrunner. Enhanced robustness “Robustness” permits an application’s shaders to access buffers out-of-bounds without crashing the hardware. In OpenGL and Vulkan, out-of-bounds loads may return arbitrary elements, and out-of-bounds stores may corrupt the buffer. Our OpenGL driver exploits this definition for efficient robustness on the M1. Some games require stronger guarantees. In DirectX, out-of-bounds loads return zero, and out-of-bounds stores are ignored. DXVK therefore requires VK_EXT_robustness2, a Vulkan extension strengthening robustness. Like before, we implement robustness with compare-and-select instructions. A naïve implementation would compare a loaded index with the buffer size and select a zero result if out-of-bounds. However, our GPU loads are vector while arithmetic is scalar. Even if we disabled page faults, we would need up to four compare-and-selects per load. load R, buffer, index * 16 ulesel R[0], index, size, R[0], 0 ulesel R[1], index, size, R[1], 0 ulesel R[2], index, size, R[2], 0 ulesel R[3], index, size, R[3], 0 There’s a trick: reserve 64 gigabytes of zeroes using virtual memory voodoo. Since every 32-bit index multiplied by 16 fits in 64 gigabytes, any index into this region loads zeroes. For out-of-bounds loads, we simply replace the buffer address with the reserved address while preserving the index. Replacing a 64-bit address costs just two 32-bit compare-and-selects. ulesel buffer.lo, index, size, buffer.lo, RESERVED.lo ulesel buffer.hi, index, size, buffer.hi, RESERVED.hi load R, buffer, index * 16 Two instructions, not four. Next steps Sparse texturing is next for Honeykrisp, which will unlock more DX12 games. The alpha already runs DX12 games that don’t require sparse, like Cyberpunk 2077. While many games are playable, newer AAA titles don’t hit 60fps yet. Correctness comes first. Performance improves next. Indie games like Hollow Knight do run full speed. Beyond gaming, we’re adding general purpose x86 emulation based on this stack. For more information, see the FAQ. Today’s alpha is a taste of what’s to come. Not the final form, but enough to enjoy Portal 2 while we work towards “1.0”. Acknowledgements This work has been years in the making with major contributions from… Alyssa Rosenzweig Asahi Lina chaos_princess Davide Cavalca Dougall Johnson Ella Stanforth Faith Ekstrand Janne Grunau Karol Herbst marcan Mary Guillemard Neal Gompa Sergio López TellowKrinkle Teoh Han Hui Rob Clark Ryan Houdek … Plus hundreds of developers whose work we build upon, spanning the Linux, Mesa, Wine, and FEX projects. Today’s release is thanks to the magic of open source. We hope you enjoy the magic. Happy gaming.
u{text-decoration-thickness:0.09em;text-decoration-color:skyblue} Finally, conformant Vulkan for the M1! The new “Honeykrisp” driver is the first conformant Vulkan® for Apple hardware on any operating system, implementing the full 1.3 spec without “portability” waivers. Honeykrisp is not yet released for end users. We’re continuing to add features, improve performance, and port to more hardware. Source code is available for developers. HoloCure running on Honeykrisp ft. DXVK, FEX, and Proton. Honeykrisp is not based on prior M1 Vulkan efforts, but rather Faith Ekstrand’s open source NVK driver for NVIDIA GPUs. In her words: All Vulkan drivers in Mesa trace their lineage to the Intel Vulkan driver and started by copying+pasting from it. My hope is that NVK will eventually become the driver that everyone copies and pastes from. To that end, I’m building NVK with all the best practices we’ve developed for Vulkan drivers over the last 7.5 years and trying to keep the code-base clean and well-organized. Why spend years implementing features from scratch when we can reuse NVK? There will be friction starting out, given NVIDIA’s desktop architecture differs from the M1’s mobile roots. In exchange, we get a modern driver designed for desktop games. We’ll need to pass a half-million tests ensuring correctness, submit the results, and then we’ll become conformant after 30 days of industry review. Starting from NVK and our OpenGL 4.6 driver… can we write a driver passing the Vulkan 1.3 conformance test suite faster than the 30 day review period? It’s unprecedented… Challenge accepted. April 2 It begins with a text. Faith… I think I want to write a Vulkan driver. Her advice? Just start typing. Thre’s no copy-pasting yet – we just add M1 code to NVK and remove NVIDIA as we go. Since the kernel mediates our access to the hardware, we begin connecting “NVK” to Asahi Lina’s kernel driver using code shared with OpenGL. Then we plug in our shader compiler and hit the hay. April 3 To access resources, GPUs use “descriptors” containing the address, format, and size of a resource. Vulkan bundles descriptors into “sets” per the application’s “descriptor set layout”. When compiling shaders, the driver lowers descriptor accesses to marry the set layout with the hardware’s data structures. As our descriptors differ from NVIDIA’s, our next task is adapting NVK’s descriptor set lowering. We start with a simple but correct approach, deleting far more code than we add. April 4 With working descriptors, we can compile compute shaders. Now we program the fixed-function hardware to dispatch compute. We first add bookkeeping to map Vulkan command buffers to lists of M1 “control streams”, then we generate a compute control stream. We copy that code from our OpenGL driver, translate the GL into Vulkan, and compute works. That’s enough to move on to “copies” of buffers and images. We implement Vulkan’s copies with compute shaders, internally dispatched with Vulkan commands as if we were the application. The first copy test passes. April 5 Fleshing out yesterday’s code, all copy tests pass. April 6 We’re ready to tackle graphics. The novelty is handling graphics state like depth/stencil. That’s straightforward, but there’s a lot of state to handle. Faith’s code collects all “dynamic state” into a single structure, which we translate into hardware control words. As usual, we grab that translation from our OpenGL driver, blend with NVK, and move on. April 7 What makes state “dynamic”? Dynamic state can change without recompiling shaders. By contrast, static state is baked into shader binaries called “pipelines”. If games create all their pipelines during a loading screen, there is no compiler “stutter” during gameplay. The idea hasn’t quite panned out: many game developers don’t know their state ahead-of-time so cannot create pipelines early. In response, Vulkan has made ever more state dynamic, punctuated with the EXT_shader_object extension that makes pipelines optional. We want full dynamic state and shader objects. Unfortunately, the M1 bakes random state into shaders: vertex attributes, fragment outputs, blending, even linked interpolation qualifiers. Like most of the industry in the 2010s, the M1’s designers bet on pipelines. Faced with this hardware, a reasonable driver developer would double-down on pipelines. DXVK would stutter, but we’d pass conformance. I am not reasonable. To eliminate stuttering in OpenGL, we make state dynamic with four strategies: Conditional code. Precompiled variants. Indirection. Prologs and epilogs. Wait, what-a-logs? AMD also bakes state into shaders… with a twist. They divide the hardware binary into three parts: a prolog, the shader, and an epilog. Confining dynamic state to the periphery eliminates shader variants. They compile prologs and epilogs on the fly, but that’s fast and doesn’t stutter. Linking shader parts is a quick concatenation, or long jumps avoid linking altogether. This strategy works for the M1, too. For Honeykrisp, let’s follow NVK’s lead and treat all state as dynamic. No other Vulkan driver has implemented full dynamic state and shader objects this early on, but it avoids refactoring later. Today we add the code to build, compile, and cache prologs and epilogs. Putting it together, we get a (dynamic) triangle: April 8 Guided by the list of failing tests, we wire up the little bits missed along the way, like translating border colours. /* Translate an American VkBorderColor into a Canadian agx_border_colour */ enum agx_border_colour translate_border_color(VkBorderColor color) { switch (color) { case VK_BORDER_COLOR_INT_TRANSPARENT_BLACK: return AGX_BORDER_COLOUR_TRANSPARENT_BLACK; ... } } Test results are getting there. Pass: 149770, Fail: 7741, Crash: 2396 That’s good enough for vkQuake. April 9 Lots of little fixes bring us to a 99.6% pass rate… for Vulkan 1.1. Why stop there? NVK is 1.3 conformant, so let’s claim 1.3 and skip to the finish line. Pass: 255209, Fail: 3818, Crash: 599 98.3% pass rate for 1.3 on our 1 week anniversary. Not bad. April 10 SuperTuxKart has a Vulkan renderer. April 11 Zink works too. April 12 I tracked down some fails to a test bug, where an arbitrary verification threshold was too strict to pass on some devices. I filed a bug report, and it’s resolved within a few weeks. April 16 The tests for “descriptor indexing” revealed a compiler bug affecting subgroup shuffles in non-uniform control flow. The M1’s shuffle instruction is quirky, but it’s easy to workaround. Fixing that fixes the descriptor indexing tests. April 17 A few tests crash inside our register allocator. Their shaders contain a peculiar construction: if (condition) { while (true) { } } condition is always false, but the compiler doesn’t know that. Infinite loops are nominally invalid since shaders must terminate in finite time, but this shader is syntactically valid. “All loops contain a break” seems obvious for a shader, but it’s false. It’s straightforward to fix register allocation, but what a doozy. April 18 Remember copies? They’re slow, and every frame currently requires a copy to get on screen. For “zero copy” rendering, we need enough Linux window system integration to negotiate an efficient surface layout across process boundaries. Linux uses “modifiers” for this purpose, so we implement the EXT_image_drm_format_modifier extension. And by implement, I mean copy. Copies to avoid copies. April 20 “I’d like a 4K x86 Windows Direct3D PC game on a 16K arm64 Linux Vulkan Mac.” … “Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s.” April 22 As bug fixing slows down, we step back and check our driver architecture. Since we treat all state as dynamic, we don’t pre-pack control words during pipeline creation. That adds theoretical CPU overhead. Is that a problem? After some optimization, vkoverhead says we’re pushing 100 million draws per second. I think we’re okay. April 24 Time to light up YCbCr. If we don’t use special YCbCr hardware, this feature is “software-only”. However, it touches a lot of code. It touches so much code that Mohamed Ahmed spent an entire summer adding it to NVK. Which means he spent a summer adding it to Honeykrisp. Thanks, Mohamed ;-) April 25 Query copies are next. In Vulkan, the application can query the number of samples rendered, writing the result into an opaque “query pool”. The result can be copied from the query pool on the CPU or GPU. For the CPU, the driver maps the pool’s internal data structure and copies the result. This may require nontrivial repacking. For the GPU, we need to repack in a compute shader. That’s harder, because we can’t just run C code on the GPU, right? …Actually, we can. A little witchcraft makes GPU query copies as easy as C. void copy_query(struct params *p, int i) { uintptr_t dst = p->dest + i * p->stride; int query = p->first + i; if (p->available[query] || p->partial) { int q = p->index[query]; write_result(dst, p->_64, p->results[q]); } ... } April 26 The final boss: border colours, hard mode. Direct3D lets the application choose an arbitrary border colour when creating a sampler. By contrast, Vulkan only requires three border colours: (0, 0, 0, 0) – transparent black (0, 0, 0, 1) – opaque black (1, 1, 1, 1) – opaque white We handled these on April 8. Unfortunately, there are two problems. First, we need custom border colours for Direct3D compatibility. Both DXVK and vkd3d-proton require the EXT_custom_border_color extension. Second, there’s a subtle problem with our hardware, causing dozens of fails even without custom border colours. To understand the issue, let’s revisit texture descriptors, which contain a pixel format and a component reordering swizzle. Some formats are implicitly reordered. Common “BGRA” formats swap red and blue for historical reasons. The M1 does not directly support these formats. Instead, the driver composes the swizzle with the format’s reordering. If the application uses a BARB swizzle with a BGRA format, the driver uses an RABR swizzle with an RGBA format. There’s a catch: swizzles apply to the border colour, but formats do not. We need to undo the format reordering when programming the border colour for correct results after the hardware applies the composed swizzle. Our OpenGL driver implements border colours this way, because it knows the texture format when creating the sampler. Unfortunately, Vulkan doesn’t give us that information. Without custom border colour support, we “should” be okay. Swapping red and blue doesn’t change anything if the colour is white or black. There’s an even subtler catch. Vulkan mandates support for a packed 16-bit format with 4-bit components. The M1 supports a similar format… but with reversed “endianness”, swapping red and alpha. That still seems okay. For transparent black (all zero) and opaque white (all one), swapping components doesn’t change the result. The problem is opaque black: (0, 0, 0, 1). Swapping red and alpha gives (1, 0, 0, 0). Transparent red? Uh-oh. We’re stuck. No known hardware configuration implements correct Vulkan semantics. Is hope lost? Do we give up? A reasonable person would. I am not reasonable. Let’s jump into the deep end. If we implement custom border colours, opaque black becomes a special case. But how? The M1’s custom border colours entangle the texture format with the sampler. A reasonable person would skip Direct3D support. As you know, I am not reasonable. Although the hardware is unsuitable, we control software. Whenever a shader samples a texture, we’ll inject code to fix up the border colour. This emulation is simple, correct, and slow. We’ll use dirty driver tricks to speed it up later. For now, we eat the cost, advertise full custom border colours, and pass the opaque black tests. April 27 All that’s left is some last minute bug fixing, and… Pass: 686930, Fail: 0 Success. The future The next task is implementing everything that DXVK and vkd3d-proton require to layer Direct3D. That includes esoteric extensions like transform feedback. Then Wine and an open source x86 emulator will run Windows games on Asahi Linux. That’s getting ahead of ourselves. In the mean time, enjoy Linux games with our conformant OpenGL 4.6 drivers… and stay tuned. Baby Storm running on Honeykrisp ft. DXVK, FEX, and Proton.
For years, the M1 has only supported OpenGL 4.1. That changes today – with our release of full OpenGL® 4.6 and OpenGL® ES 3.2! Install Fedora for the latest M1/M2-series drivers. Already installed? Just dnf –refresh upgrade. Unlike the vendor’s non-conformant 4.1 drivers, our open source Linux drivers are conformant to the latest OpenGL versions, finally promising broad compatibility with modern OpenGL workloads, like Blender, Ryujinx, and Citra. Conformant 4.6/3.2 drivers must pass over 100,000 tests to ensure correctness. The official list of conformant drivers now includes our OpenGL 4.6 and ES 3.2. While the vendor doesn’t yet support graphics standards like modern OpenGL, we do. For this Valentine’s Day, we want to profess our love for interoperable open standards. We want to free users and developers from lock-in, enabling applications to run anywhere the heart wants without special ports. For that, we need standards conformance. Six months ago, we became the first conformant driver for any standard graphics API for the M1 with the release of OpenGL ES 3.1 drivers. Today, we’ve finished OpenGL with the full 4.6… and we’re well on the road to Vulkan. Compared to 4.1, OpenGL 4.6 adds dozens of required features, including: Robustness SPIR-V Clip control Cull distance Compute shaders Upgraded transform feedback Regrettably, the M1 doesn’t map well to any graphics standard newer than OpenGL ES 3.1. While Vulkan makes some of these features optional, the missing features are required to layer DirectX and OpenGL on top. No existing solution on M1 gets past the OpenGL 4.1 feature set. How do we break the 4.1 barrier? Without hardware support, new features need new tricks. Geometry shaders, tessellation, and transform feedback become compute shaders. Cull distance becomes a transformed interpolated value. Clip control becomes a vertex shader epilogue. The list goes on. For a taste of the challenges we overcame, let’s look at robustness. Built for gaming, GPUs traditionally prioritize raw performance over safety. Invalid application code, like a shader that reads a buffer out-of-bounds, can trigger undefined behaviour. Drivers exploit that to maximize performance. For applications like web browsers, that trade-off is undesirable. Browsers handle untrusted shaders, which they must sanitize to ensure stability and security. Clicking a malicious link should not crash the browser. While some sanitization is necessary as graphics APIs are not security barriers, reducing undefined behaviour in the API can assist “defence in depth”. “Robustness” features can help. Without robustness, out-of-bounds buffer access in a shader can crash. With robustness, the application can opt for defined out-of-bounds behaviour, trading some performance for less attack surface. All modern cross-vendor APIs include robustness. Many games even (accidentally?) rely on robustness. Strangely, the vendor’s proprietary API omits buffer robustness. We must do better for conformance, correctness, and compatibility. Let’s first define the problem. Different APIs have different definitions of what an out-of-bounds load returns when robustness is enabled: Zero (Direct3D, Vulkan with robustBufferAccess2) Either zero or some data in the buffer (OpenGL, Vulkan with robustBufferAccess) Arbitrary values, but can’t crash (OpenGL ES) OpenGL uses the second definition: return zero or data from the buffer. One approach is to return the last element of the buffer for out-of-bounds access. Given the buffer size, we can calculate the last index. Now consider the minimum of the index being accessed and the last index. That equals the index being accessed if it is valid, and some other valid index otherwise. Loading the minimum index is safe and gives a spec-compliant result. As an example, a uniform buffer load without robustness might look like: load.i32 result, buffer, index Robustness adds a single unsigned minimum (umin) instruction: umin idx, index, last load.i32 result, buffer, idx Is the robust version slower? It can be. The difference should be small percentage-wise, as arithmetic is faster than memory. With thousands of threads running in parallel, the arithmetic cost may even be hidden by the load’s latency. There’s another trick that speeds up robust uniform buffers. Like other GPUs, the M1 supports “preambles”. The idea is simple: instead of calculating the same value in every thread, it’s faster to calculate once and reuse the result. The compiler identifies eligible calculations and moves them to a preamble executed before the main shader. These redundancies are common, so preambles provide a nice speed-up. We usually move uniform buffer loads to the preamble when every thread loads the same index. Since the size of a uniform buffer is fixed, extra robustness arithmetic is also moved to the preamble. The robustness is “free” for the main shader. For robust storage buffers, the clamping might move to the preamble even if the load or store cannot. Armed with robust uniform and storage buffers, let’s consider robust “vertex buffers”. In graphics APIs, the application can set vertex buffers with a base GPU address and a chosen layout of “attributes” within each buffer. Each attribute has an offset and a format, and the buffer has a “stride” indicating the number of bytes per vertex. The vertex shader can then read attributes, implicitly indexing by the vertex. To do so, the shader loads the address: Some hardware implements robust vertex fetch natively. Other hardware has bounds-checked buffers to accelerate robust software vertex fetch. Unfortunately, the M1 has neither. We need to implement vertex fetch with raw memory loads. One instruction set feature helps. In addition to a 64-bit base address, the M1 GPU’s memory loads also take an offset in elements. The hardware shifts the offset and adds to the 64-bit base to determine the address to fetch. Additionally, the M1 has a combined integer multiply-add instruction imad. Together, these features let us implement vertex loads in two instructions. For example, a 32-bit attribute load looks like: imad idx, stride/4, vertex, offset/4 load.i32 result, base, idx The hardware load can perform an additional small shift. Suppose our attribute is a vector of 4 32-bit values, densely packed into a buffer with no offset. We can load that attribute in one instruction: load.v4i32 result, base, vertex << 2 …with the hardware calculating the address: What about robustness? We want to implement robustness with a clamp, like we did for uniform buffers. The problem is that the vertex buffer size is given in bytes, while our optimized load takes an index in “vertices”. A single vertex buffer can contain multiple attributes with different formats and offsets, so we can’t convert the size in bytes to a size in “vertices”. Let’s handle the latter problem. We can rewrite the addressing equation as: That is: one buffer with many attributes at different offsets is equivalent to many buffers with one attribute and no offset. This gives an alternate perspective on the same data layout. Is this an improvement? It avoids an addition in the shader, at the cost of passing more data – addresses are 64-bit while attribute offsets are 16-bit. More importantly, it lets us translate the vertex buffer size in bytes into a size in “vertices” for each vertex attribute. Instead of clamping the offset, we clamp the vertex index. We still make full use of the hardware addressing modes, now with robustness: umin idx, vertex, last valid load.v4i32 result, base, idx << 2 We need to calculate the last valid vertex index ahead-of-time for each attribute. Each attribute has a format with a particular size. Manipulating the addressing equation, we can calculate the last byte accessed in the buffer (plus 1) relative to the base: The load is valid when that value is bounded by the buffer size in bytes. We solve the integer inequality as: The driver calculates the right-hand side and passes it into the shader. One last problem: what if a buffer is too small to load anything? Clamping won’t save us – the code would clamp to a negative index. In that case, the attribute is entirely invalid, so we swap the application’s buffer for a small buffer of zeroes. Since we gave each attribute its own base address, this determination is per-attribute. Then clamping the index to zero correctly loads zeroes. Putting it together, a little driver math gives us robust buffers at the cost of one umin instruction. In addition to buffer robustness, we need image robustness. Like its buffer counterpart, image robustness requires that out-of-bounds image loads return zero. That formalizes a guarantee that reasonable hardware already makes. …But it would be no fun if our hardware was reasonable. Running the conformance tests for image robustness, there is a single test failure affecting “mipmapping”. For background, mipmapped images contain multiple “levels of detail”. The base level is the original image; each successive level is the previous level downscaled. When rendering, the hardware selects the level closest to matching the on-screen size, improving efficiency and visual quality. With robustness, the specifications all agree that image loads return… Zero if the X- or Y-coordinate is out-of-bounds Zero if the level is out-of-bounds Meanwhile, image loads on the M1 GPU return… Zero if the X- or Y-coordinate is out-of-bounds Values from the last level if the level is out-of-bounds Uh-oh. Rather than returning zero for out-of-bounds levels, the hardware clamps the level and returns nonzero values. It’s a mystery why. The vendor does not document their hardware publicly, forcing us to rely on reverse engineering to build drivers. Without documentation, we don’t know if this behaviour is intentional or a hardware bug. Either way, we need a workaround to pass conformance. The obvious workaround is to never load from an invalid level: if (level <= levels) { return imageLoad(x, y, level); } else { return 0; } That involves branching, which is inefficient. Loading an out-of-bounds level doesn’t crash, so we can speculatively load and then use a compare-and-select operation instead of branching: vec4 data = imageLoad(x, y, level); return (level <= levels) ? data : 0; This workaround is okay, but it could be improved. While the M1 GPU has combined compare-and-select instructions, the instruction set is scalar. Each thread processes one value at a time, not a vector of multiple values. However, image loads return a vector of four components (red, green, blue, alpha). While the pseudo-code looks efficient, the resulting assembly is not: image_load R, x, y, level ulesel R[0], level, levels, R[0], 0 ulesel R[1], level, levels, R[1], 0 ulesel R[2], level, levels, R[2], 0 ulesel R[3], level, levels, R[3], 0 Fortunately, the vendor driver has a trick. We know the hardware returns zero if either X or Y is out-of-bounds, so we can force a zero output by setting X or Y out-of-bounds. As the maximum image size is 16384 pixels wide, any X greater than 16384 is out-of-bounds. That justifies an alternate workaround: bool valid = (level <= levels); int x_ = valid ? x : 20000; return imageLoad(x_, y, level); Why is this better? We only change a single scalar, not a whole vector, compiling to compact scalar assembly: ulesel x_, level, levels, x, #20000 image_load R, x_, y, level If we preload the constant to a uniform register, the workaround is a single instruction. That’s optimal – and it passes conformance. Blender “Wanderer” demo by Daniel Bystedt, licensed CC BY-SA.
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(Last week's newsletter took too long and I'm way behind on Logic for Programmers revisions so short one this time.1) In classical logic, two operators F/G are duals if F(x) = !G(!x). Three examples: x || y is the same as !(!x && !y). <>P ("P is possibly true") is the same as ![]!P ("not P isn't definitely true"). some x in set: P(x) is the same as !(all x in set: !P(x)). (1) is just a version of De Morgan's Law, which we regularly use to simplify boolean expressions. (2) is important in modal logic but has niche applications in software engineering, mostly in how it powers various formal methods.2 The real interesting one is (3), the "quantifier duals". We use lots of software tools to either find a value satisfying P or check that all values satisfy P. And by duality, any tool that does one can do the other, by seeing if it fails to find/check !P. Some examples in the wild: Z3 is used to solve mathematical constraints, like "find x, where f(x) >= 0. If I want to prove a property like "f is always positive", I ask z3 to solve "find x, where !(f(x) >= 0), and see if that is unsatisfiable. This use case powers a LOT of theorem provers and formal verification tooling. Property testing checks that all inputs to a code block satisfy a property. I've used it to generate complex inputs with certain properties by checking that all inputs don't satisfy the property and reading out the test failure. Model checkers check that all behaviors of a specification satisfy a property, so we can find a behavior that reaches a goal state G by checking that all states are !G. Here's TLA+ solving a puzzle this way.3 Planners find behaviors that reach a goal state, so we can check if all behaviors satisfy a property P by asking it to reach goal state !P. The problem "find the shortest traveling salesman route" can be broken into some route: distance(route) = n and all route: !(distance(route) < n). Then a route finder can find the first, and then convert the second into a some and fail to find it, proving n is optimal. Even cooler to me is when a tool does both finding and checking, but gives them different "meanings". In SQL, some x: P(x) is true if we can query for P(x) and get a nonempty response, while all x: P(x) is true if all records satisfy the P(x) constraint. Most SQL databases allow for complex queries but not complex constraints! You got UNIQUE, NOT NULL, REFERENCES, which are fixed predicates, and CHECK, which is one-record only.4 Oh, and you got database triggers, which can run arbitrary queries and throw exceptions. So if you really need to enforce a complex constraint P(x, y, z), you put in a database trigger that queries some x, y, z: !P(x, y, z) and throws an exception if it finds any results. That all works because of quantifier duality! See here for an example of this in practice. Duals more broadly "Dual" doesn't have a strict meaning in math, it's more of a vibe thing where all of the "duals" are kinda similar in meaning but don't strictly follow all of the same rules. Usually things X and Y are duals if there is some transform F where X = F(Y) and Y = F(X), but not always. Maybe the category theorists have a formal definition that covers all of the different uses. Usually duals switch properties of things, too: an example showing some x: P(x) becomes a counterexample of all x: !P(x). Under this definition, I think the dual of a list l could be reverse(l). The first element of l becomes the last element of reverse(l), the last becomes the first, etc. A more interesting case is the dual of a K -> set(V) map is the V -> set(K) map. IE the dual of lived_in_city = {alice: {paris}, bob: {detroit}, charlie: {detroit, paris}} is city_lived_in_by = {paris: {alice, charlie}, detroit: {bob, charlie}}. This preserves the property that x in map[y] <=> y in dual[x]. And after writing this I just realized this is partial retread of a newsletter I wrote a couple months ago. But only a partial retread! ↩ Specifically "linear temporal logics" are modal logics, so "eventually P ("P is true in at least one state of each behavior") is the same as saying !always !P ("not P isn't true in all states of all behaviors"). This is the basis of liveness checking. ↩ I don't know for sure, but my best guess is that Antithesis does something similar when their fuzzer beats videogames. They're doing fuzzing, not model checking, but they have the same purpose check that complex state spaces don't have bugs. Making the bug "we can't reach the end screen" can make a fuzzer output a complete end-to-end run of the game. Obvs a lot more complicated than that but that's the general idea at least. ↩ For CHECK to constraint multiple records you would need to use a subquery. Core SQL does not support subqueries in check. It is an optional database "feature outside of core SQL" (F671), which Postgres does not support. ↩
Omarchy 2.0 was released on Linux's 34th birthday as a gift to perhaps the greatest open-source project the world has ever known. Not only does Linux run 95% of all servers on the web, billions of devices as an embedded OS, but it also turns out to be an incredible desktop environment! It's crazy that it took me more than thirty years to realize this, but while I spent time in Apple's walled garden, the free software alternative simply grew better, stronger, and faster. The Linux of 2025 is not the Linux of the 90s or the 00s or even the 10s. It's shockingly more polished, capable, and beautiful. It's been an absolute honor to celebrate Linux with the making of Omarchy, the new Linux distribution that I've spent the last few months building on top of Arch and Hyprland. What began as a post-install script has turned into a full-blown ISO, dedicated package repository, and flourishing community of thousands of enthusiasts all collaborating on making it better. It's been improving rapidly with over twenty releases since the premiere in late June, but this Version 2.0 update is the biggest one yet. If you've been curious about giving Linux a try, you're not afraid of an operating system that asks you to level up and learn a little, and you want to see what a totally different computing experience can look and feel like, I invite you to give it a go. Here's a full tour of Omarchy 2.0.
TokyoDev has published a number of different guides on coming to Japan to work as a software developer. But what if you’re already employed in another industry in Japan, and are considering changing your career to software development? I interviewed four people who became developers after they moved to Japan, for their advice and personal experiences on: Why they chose development How they switched careers How they successfully found their first jobs What mistakes they made in the job hunt The most important advice they give to others Why switch to software development? A lifelong goal For Yuta Asakura, a career in software was the dream all along. “I’ve always wanted to work with computers,” he said, “but due to financial difficulties, I couldn’t pursue a degree in computer science. I had to start working early to support my single mother. As the eldest child, I focused on helping my younger brother complete his education.” To support his family, Asakura worked in construction for eight years, eventually becoming a foreman in Yokohama. Meanwhile, his brother graduated, and became a software engineer after joining the Le Wagon Tokyo bootcamp. About a year before his brother graduated, Asakura began to delve back into development. “I had already begun self-studying in my free time by taking online courses and building small projects,” he explained. “ I quickly became hooked by how fun and empowering it was to learn, apply, and build. It wasn’t always easy. There were moments I wanted to give up, but the more I learned, the more interesting things I could create. That feeling kept me going.” What truly inspired me was the idea of creating something from nothing. Coming from a construction background, I was used to building things physically. But I wanted to create things that were digital, scalable, borderless, and meaningful to others. An unexpected passion As Andrew Wilson put it, “Wee little Andrew had a very digital childhood,” full of games and computer time. Rather than pursuing tech, however, he majored in Japanese and moved to Japan in 2012, where he initially worked as a language teacher and recruiter before settling into sales. Wilson soon discovered that sales wasn’t really his strong suit. “At the time I was selling three different enterprise software solutions.” So I had to have a fairly deep understanding of that software from a user perspective, and in the course of learning about these products and giving technical demonstrations, I realized that I liked doing that bit of my job way more than I liked actually trying to sell these things. Around that time, he also realized he didn’t want to manually digitize the many business cards he always collected during sales meetings: “That’s boring, and I’m lazy.” So instead, he found a business card-scanning app, made a spreadsheet to contain the data, automated the whole process, and shared it internally within his company. His manager approached him soon afterwards, saying, “You built this? We were looking to hire someone to do this!” Encouraged, Wilson continued to develop it. “As soon as I was done with work,” he explained with a laugh, “I was like, ‘Oh boy, I can work on my spreadsheet!’” As a result, Wilson came to the conclusion that he really should switch careers and pursue his passion for programming. Similarly to Wilson, Malcolm Hendricks initially focused on Japanese. He came to Japan as an exchange student in 2002, and traveled to Japan several more times before finally relocating in 2011. Though his original role was as a language teacher, he soon found a job at a Japanese publishing company, where he worked as an editor and writer for seven years. However, he felt burned out on the work, and also that he was in danger of stagnating; since he isn’t Japanese, the road to promotion was a difficult one. He started following some YouTube tutorials on web development, and eventually began creating websites for his friends. Along the way, he fell in love with development, on both a practical and a philosophical level. “There’s another saying I’ve heard here and there—I don’t know exactly who to attribute it to—but the essence of it goes that ‘Computer science is just teaching rocks how to think,’” Hendricks said. “My mentor Bob has been guiding me through the very fundamentals of computer science, down to binary calculations, Boolean logic, gate theory, and von Neumann architecture. He explains the fine minutia and often concludes with, ‘That’s how it works. There’s no magic to it.’ “Meanwhile, in the back of my mind, I can’t help but be mystified at the things we are all now able to do, such as having video calls from completely different parts of the world, or even me here typing on squares of plastic to make letters appear on a screen that has its own source of light inside it. . . . [It] sounds like the highest of high-fantasy wizardry to me.” I’ve always had a love for technomancy, but I never figured I might one day get the chance to be a technomancer myself. And I love it! We have the ability to create nigh unto anything in the digital world. A practical solution When Paulo D’Alberti moved to Japan in 2019, he only spoke a little Japanese, which limited his employment prospects. With his prior business experience, he landed an online marketing role for a blockchain startup, but eventually exited the company to pursue a more stable work environment. “But when I decided to leave the company,” D’Alberti said, “my Japanese was still not good enough to do business. So I was at a crossroads.” Do I decide to join a full-time Japanese language course, aiming to get JLPT N2 or the equivalent, and find a job on the business side? . . . Or do I say screw it and go for a complete career change and get skills in something more technical, that would allow me to carry those skills [with me] even if I were to move again to another country?” The portability of a career in development was a major plus for D’Alberti. “That was one of the big reasons. Another consideration was that, looking at the boot camps that were available, the promise was ‘Yeah, we’ll teach you to be a software developer in nine weeks or two months.’ That was a much shorter lead time than getting from JLPT N4 to N2. I definitely wouldn’t be able to do that in two months.” Since D’Alberti had family obligations, the timeline for his career switch was crucial. “We still had family costs and rent and groceries and all of that. I needed to find a job as soon as possible. I actually already at that point had been unsuccessfully job hunting for two months. So that was like, ‘Okay, the savings are winding up, and we are running out of options. I need to make a decision and make it fast.’” How to switch careers Method 1: Software Development Bootcamp Under pressure to find new employment quickly, D’Alberti decided to enter the Le Wagon Coding Bootcamp in Tokyo. Originally, he wavered between Le Wagon and Code Chrysalis, which has since ended its bootcamp programs. “I went with Le Wagon for two reasons,” he explained. “There were some scheduling reasons. . . . But the main reason was that Code Chrysalis required you to pass a coding exam before being admitted to their bootcamp.” Since D’Alberti was struggling to learn development by himself, he knew his chances of passing any coding exam were slim. “I tried Code Academy, I tried Solo Learn, I tried a whole bunch of apps online, I would follow the examples, the exercises . . . nothing clicked. I wouldn’t understand what I was doing or why I was doing it.” At the time, Le Wagon only offered full-time web development courses, although they now also have part-time courses and a data science curriculum. Since D’Alberti was unemployed, a full-time program wasn’t a problem for him, “But it did mean that the people who were present were very particular [kinds] of people: students who could take some time off to add this to their [coursework], or foreigners who took three months off and were traveling and decide to come here and do studying plus sightseeing, and I think there were one or two who actually asked for time off from the job in order to participate.” It was a very intense course, and the experience itself gave me exactly what I needed. I had been trying to learn by myself. It did not work. I did not understand. [After joining], the first day or second day, suddenly everything clicked. D’Alberti appreciated how Le Wagon organized the curriculum to build continuously off previous lessons. By the time he graduated in June of 2019, he’d built three applications from scratch, and felt far more confident in his coding abilities. “It was great. [The curriculum] was amazing, and I really felt super confident in my abilities after the three months. Which, looking back,” he joked, “I still had a lot to learn.” D’Alberti did have some specific advice for those considering a bootcamp: “Especially in the last couple of weeks, it can get very dramatic. You are divided into teams and as a team, you’re supposed to develop an application that you will be demonstrating in front of other people.” Some of the students, D’Alberti explained, felt that pressure intensely; one of his classmates broke down in tears. “Of course,” he added, “one of the big difficulties of joining a bootcamp is economical. The bootcamp itself is quite expensive.” While between 700,000 and 800,000 yen when D’Alberti went through the bootcamp, Le Wagon’s tuition has now risen to 890,000 yen for Web Development and 950,000 for Data Science. At the time D’Alberti joined there was no financial assistance. Now, Le Wagon has an agreement with Hello Work, so that students who are enrolled in the Hello Work system can be reimbursed for up to 70 percent of the bootcamp’s tuition. Though already studying development by himself, Asakura also enrolled in Le Wagon Tokyo in 2024, “to gain structure and accountability,” he said. One lesson that really stayed with me came from Sylvain Pierre, our bootcamp director. He said, ‘You stop being a developer the moment you stop learning or coding.’ That mindset helped me stay on track. Method 2: Online computer science degree Wilson considered going the bootcamp route, but decided against it. He knew, from his experience in recruiting, that a degree would give him an edge—especially in Japan, where having the right degree can make a difference in visa eligibility “The quality of bootcamps is perfectly fine,” he explained. “If you go through a bootcamp and study hard, you can get a job and become a developer no problem. I wanted to differentiate myself on paper as much as I could . . . [because] there are a lot of smart, motivated people who go through a bootcamp.” Whether it’s true or not, whether it’s valid or not, if you take two candidates who are very similar on paper, and one has a coding bootcamp and one has a degree, from a typical Japanese HR perspective, they’re going to lean toward the person with the degree. “Whether that’s good or not, that’s sort of a separate situation,” Wilson added. “But the reality [is] I’m older and I’m trying to make a career change, so I want to make sure that I’m giving myself every advantage that I can.” For these reasons, Wilson opted to get his computer science degree online. “There’s a program out of the University of Oregon, for people who already had a Bachelor’s degree in a different subject to get a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. “Because it’s limited to people who already have a Bachelor’s degree, that means you don’t need to take any non-computer science classes. You don’t need any electives or prerequisites or anything like that.” As it happened, Wilson was on paternity leave when he started studying for his degree. “That was one of my motivations to finish quickly!” he said. In the end, with his employer’s cooperation, he extended his paternity leave to two years, and finished the degree in five quarters. Method 3: Self-taught Hendricks took a different route, combining online learning materials with direct experience. He primarily used YouTube tutorials, like this project from one of his favorite channels, to teach himself. Once he had the basics down, he started creating websites for friends, as well as for the publishing company he worked for at the time. With every site, he’d put his name at the bottom of the page, as a form of marketing. This worked well enough that Hendricks was able to quit his work at the translation company and transition to full-time freelancing. However, eventually the freelancing work dried up, and he decided he wanted to experience working at a tech company—and not just for job security reasons. Hendricks saw finding a full-time development role as the perfect opportunity to push himself and see just how far he could get in his new career. There’s a common trope, probably belonging more to the sports world at large, about the importance of shedding ‘blood, sweat, and tears’ in the pursuit of one’s passion . . . and that’s also how I wanted to cut my teeth in the software engineering world. The job hunt While all four are now successfully employed as developers, Asakura, D’Alberti, Wilson, and Hendricks approached and experienced the job hunt differently. Following is their hard-earned advice on best practices and common mistakes. DO network When Hendricks started his job hunt, he faced the disadvantages of not having any formal experience, and also being both physically and socially isolated from other developers. Since he and his family were living in Nagano, he wasn’t able to participate in most of the tech events and meet-ups available in Tokyo or other big cities. His initial job hunt took around a year, and at one point he was sending so many applications that he received a hundred rejections in a week. It wasn’t until he started connecting with the community that he was able to turn it around, eventually getting three good job offers in a single week. Networking, for me, is what made all the difference. It was through networking that I found my mentors, found community, and joined and even started a few great Discord servers. These all undeniably contributed to me ultimately landing my current job, but they also made me feel welcome in the industry. Hendricks particularly credits his mentors, Ean More and Bob Cousins, for giving him great advice. “My initial mentor [Ean More] I actually met through a mutual IT networking Facebook group. I noticed that he was one of the more active members, and that he was always ready to lend a hand to help others with their questions and spread a deeper understanding of programming and computer science. He also often posted snippets of his own code to share with the community and receive feedback, and I was interested in a lot of what he was posting. “I reached out to him and told him I thought it was amazing how selfless he was in the group, and that, while I’m still a junior, if there was ever any grunt work I could do under his guidance, I would be happy to do so. Since he had a history of mentoring others, he offered to do so for me, and we’ve been mentor/mentee and friends ever since.” “My other mentor [Bob Cousins],” Hendricks continued, “was a friend of my late uncle’s. My uncle had originally begun mentoring me shortly before his passing. We were connected through a mutual friend whom I lamented to about not having any clue how to continue following the path my uncle had originally laid before me. He mentioned that he knew just the right person and gave me an email address to contact. I sent an email to the address and was greeted warmly by the man who would become another mentor, and like an uncle to me.” Although Hendricks found him via a personal connection, Cousins runs a mentorship program that caters to a wide variety of industries. Wilson also believes in the power of networking—and not just for the job hunt. “One of the things I like about programming,” he said, “is that it’s a very collaborative community. Everybody wants to help everybody.” We remember that everyone had to start somewhere, and we’ll take time to help those starting out. It’s a very welcoming community. Just do it! We’re all here for you, and if you need help I’ll refer you. Asakura, by contrast, thinks that networking can help, but that it works a little differently in Japan than in other countries. “Don’t rely on it too much,” he said. “Unlike in Western countries, personal referrals don’t always lead directly to job opportunities in Japan. Your skills, effort, and consistency will matter more in the long run.” DO treat the job hunt like a job Once he’d graduated from Le Wagon, D’Alberti said, “I considered job-hunting my full-time job.” I checked all the possible networking events and meetup events that were going on in the city, and tried to attend all of them, every single day. I had a list of 10 different job boards that I would go and just refresh on a daily basis to see, ‘Okay, Is there anything new now?’ And, of course, I talked with recruiters. D’Alberti suggests beginning the search earlier than you think you need to. “I had started actively job hunting even before graduating [from Le Wagon],” he said. “That’s advice I give to everyone who joins the bootcamp. “Two weeks before graduation, you have one simple web application that you can show. You have a second one you’re working on in a team, and you have a third one that you know what it’s going to be about. So, already, there are three applications that you can showcase or you can use to explain your skills. I started going to meetups and to different events, talking with people, showing my CV.” The process wasn’t easy, as most companies and recruiters weren’t interested in hiring for junior roles. But his intensive strategy paid off within a month, as D’Albert landed three invitations to interview: one from a Japanese job board, one from a recruiter, and one from LinkedIn. For Asakura, treating job hunting like a job was as much for his mental health as for his career. “The biggest challenge was dealing with impostor syndrome and feeling like I didn’t belong because I didn’t have a computer science degree,” he explained. “I also experienced burnout from pushing myself too hard.” To cope, I stuck to a structured routine. I went to the gym daily to decompress, kept a consistent study schedule as if I were working full-time, and continued applying for jobs even when it felt hopeless. At first, Asakura tried to apply to jobs strategically by tracking each application, tailoring his resume, and researching every role. “But after dozens of rejections,” he said, “I eventually switched to applying more broadly and sent out over one hundred applications. I also reached out to friends who were already software engineers and asked for direct referrals, but unfortunately, nothing worked out.” Still, Asakura didn’t give up. He practiced interviews in both English and Japanese with his friends, and stayed in touch with recruiters. Most importantly, he kept developing and adding to his portfolio. DO make use of online resources “What ultimately helped me was staying active and visible,” Asakura said. I consistently updated my GitHub, LInkedIn, and Wantedly profiles. Eventually, I received a message on Wantedly from the CTO of a company who was impressed with my portfolio, and that led to my first developer job.” “If you have the time, certifications can also help validate your knowledge,” Asakura added, “especially in fields like cloud and AI. Some people may not realize this, but the rise of artificial intelligence is closely tied to the growth of cloud computing. Earning certifications such as AWS, Kubernetes, and others can give you a strong foundation and open new opportunities, especially as these technologies continue to evolve.” Hendricks also heavily utilized LinkedIn and similar sites, though in a slightly different way. “I would also emphasize the importance of knowing how to use job-hunting sites like Indeed and LinkedIn,” he said. “I had the best luck when I used them primarily to do initial research into companies, then applied directly through the companies’ own websites, rather than through job postings that filter applicants before their resumés ever make it to the actual people looking to hire.” In addition, Hendricks recommends studying coding interview prep tutorials from freeCodeCamp. Along with advice from his mentors and the online communities he joined, he credits those tutorials with helping him successfully receive offers after a long job hunt. DO highlight experience with Japanese culture and language Asakura felt that his experience in Japan, and knowledge of Japanese, gave him an edge. “I understand Japanese work culture [and] can speak the language,” Asakura said, “and as a Japanese national I didn’t require visa sponsorship. That made me a lower-risk hire for companies here.” Hendricks also felt that his excellent Japanese made him a more attractive hire. While applying, he emphasized to companies that he could be a bridge to the global market and business overseas. However, he also admitted this strategy steered him towards applying with more domestic Japanese companies, which were also less likely to hire someone without a computer science degree. “So,” he said, “it sort of washed out.” Wilson is another who put a lot of emphasis on his Japanese language skills, from a slightly different angle. A lot of interviewees typically don’t speak Japanese well . . . and a lot of companies here say that they’re very international, but if they want very good programmers, [those people] spend their lives programming, not studying English. So having somebody who can bridge the language gap on the IT side can be helpful. DO lean into your other experience Several career switchers discovered that their past experiences and skills, while not immediately relevant to their new career, still proved quite helpful in landing that first role—sometimes in very unexpected ways. When Wilson was pitching his language skills to companies, he wasn’t talking about just Japanese–English translation. He also highlighted his prior experience in sales to suggest that he could help communicate with and educate non-technical audiences. “Actually to be a software engineer, there’s a lot of technical communication you have to do.” I have worked with some incredible coders who are so good at the technical side and just don’t want to do the personal side. But for those of us who are not super-geniuses and can’t rely purely on our tech skills . . . there’s a lot of non-technical discussion that goes around building a product.” This strategy, while eventually fruitful, didn’t earn Wilson a job right away. Initially, he applied to more than sixty companies over the course of three to four months. “I didn’t have any professional [coding] experience, so it was actually quite a rough time,” he said. “I interviewed all over the place. I was getting rejected all over town.” The good news was, Wilson said, “I’m from Chicago. I don’t know what it is, but there are a lot of Chicagoans who work in Tokyo for whatever reason.” When he finally landed an interview, one of the three founders of the company was also from Chicago, giving them something in common. “We hit it off really well in the interview. I think that kind of gave me the edge to get the role, to be honest.” Like Wilson, D’Alberti found that his previous work as a marketer helped him secure his first developer role—which was ironic, he felt, given that he’d partially chosen to switch careers because he hadn’t been able to find an English-language marketing job in Japan. “I had my first interview with the CEO,” he told me, “and this was for a Japanese startup that was building chatbots, and they wanted to expand into the English market. So I talked with the CEO, and he was very excited to get to know me and sent me to talk with the CTO.” The CTO, unfortunately, wasn’t interested in hiring a junior developer with no professional experience. “And I thought that was the end of it. But then I got called again by the CEO. I wanted to join for the engineering position, and he wanted to have me for my marketing experience.” In the end we agreed that I would join in a 50-50 arrangement. I would do 50 percent of my job in marketing and going to conferences and talking to people, and 50 percent on the engineering side. I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll take that.’ This ended up working better than D’Alberti had expected, partially due to external circumstances. “When COVID came, we couldn’t travel abroad, so most of the job I was doing in my marketing role I couldn’t perform anymore. “So they sat me down and [said], ‘What are we going to do with you, since we cannot use you for marketing anymore?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I’m still a software developer. I could continue working in that role.’ And that actually allowed me to fully transition.” DON’T make these mistakes It was D’Alberti’s willingness to compromise on that first development role that led to his later success, so he would explicitly encourage other career-changers to avoid, in his own words, “being too picky.” This advice is based, not just on his own experience, but also on his time working as a teaching assistant at Le Wagon. “There were a couple of people who would be like, ‘Yeah, I’d really like to find a job and I’m not getting any interviews,’” he explained. “And then we’d go and ask, ‘Okay, how many companies are you applying to? What are you doing?’ But [they’d say] ‘No, see, [this company] doesn’t offer enough’ or ‘I don’t really like this company’ or ‘I’d like to do something else.’ Those who would be really picky or wouldn’t put in the effort, they wouldn’t land a job. Those who were deadly serious about ‘I need to get a job as a software developer,’ they’d find one. It might not be a great job, it might not be at a good company, but it would be a good first start from which to move on afterwards. Asakura also knew some other bootcamp graduates who struggled to find work. “A major reason was a lack of Japanese language skills,” he said. Even for junior roles, many companies in Japan require at least conversational Japanese, especially domestic ones. On the other hand, if you prioritize learning Japanese, that can give you an edge on entering the industry: “Many local companies are open to training junior developers, as long as they see your motivation and you can communicate effectively. International companies, on the other hand, often have stricter technical requirements and may pass on candidates without degrees or prior experience.” Finally, Hendricks said that during his own job hunt, “Not living in Tokyo was a problem.” It was something that he was able to overcome via diligent digital networking, but he’d encourage career-changers to think seriously about their future job prospects before settling outside a major metropolis in Japan. Their top advice I asked each developer to share their number one piece of advice for career-changers. D’Alberti wasn’t quite sure what to suggest, given recent changes in the tech market overall. “I don’t have clear advice to someone who’s trying to break into tech right now,” he said. “It might be good to wait and see what happens with the AI path. Might be good to actually learn how to code using AI, if that’s going to be the way to distinguish yourself from other junior developers. It might be to just abandon the idea of [being] a linear software developer in the traditional sense, and maybe look more into data science, if there are more opportunities.” But assuming they still decide ‘Yes, I want to join, I love the idea of being a software developer and I want to go forward’ . . . my main suggestion is patience. “It’s going to be tough,” he added. By contrast, Hendricks and Wilson had the same suggestion: if you want to change careers, then go for it, full speed ahead. “Do it now, or as soon as you possibly can,” Hendricks stated adamantly. His life has been so positively altered by discovering and pursuing his passion, that his only regret is he didn’t do it sooner. Wilson said something strikingly similar. “Do it. Just do it. I went back and forth a lot,” he explained. “‘Oh, should I do this, it’s so much money, I already have a job’ . . . just rip the bandaid off. Just do it. You probably have a good reason.” He pointed out that while starting over and looking for work is scary, it’s also possible that you’ll lose your current job anyway, at which point you’ll still be job hunting but in an industry you no longer even enjoy. “If you keep at it,” he said, “you can probably do it.” “Not to talk down to developers,” he added, “but it’s not the hardest job in the world. You have to study and learn and be the kind of person who wants to sit at the computer and write code, but if you’re thinking about it, you’re probably the kind of person who can do it, and that also means you can probably weather the awful six months of job hunting.” You only need to pass one job interview. You only need to get your foot in the door. Asakura agreed with “just do it,” but with a twist. “Build in public,” he suggested. “Share your progress. Post on GitHub. Keep your LinkedIn active.” Let people see your journey, because even small wins build momentum and credibility. “To anyone learning to code right now,” Asakura added, “don’t get discouraged by setbacks or rejections. Focus on building, learning, and showing up every day. Your portfolio speaks louder than your past, and consistency will eventually open the door.” If you want to read more how-tos and success stories around networking, working with recruitment agencies, writing your resume, etc., check out TokyoDev’s other articles. If you’d like to hear more about being a developer in Japan, we invite you to join the TokyoDev Discord, which has over 6,000 members as well as dedicated channels for resume review, job posts, life in Japan, and more.
Is a person who prompts an LLM to generate a website a web developer? And if not, what is the difference, and why does that matter so much?
