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Every 6 months or so, I decide to leave my cave and check out what the cool kids are doing with AI. Apparently the latest trend is to use fancy command line tools to write code using LLMs. This is a very nice change, since it suddenly makes AI compatible with my allergy to getting out of the terminal. The most popular of these tools seems to be Claude Code. It promises to be able to build in total autonomy, being able to use search code, write code, run tests, lint, and commit the changes. While this sounds great on paper, I’m not keen on getting locked into vendor tools from an unprofitable company. At some point, they will either need to raise their prices, enshittify their product, or most likely do both. So I went looking for what the free and open source alternatives are. Picking a model There’s a large amount of open source large language models on the market, with new ones getting released all the time. However, they are not all ready to be used locally in coding tasks, so I had to try a bunch of them before settling on one. deepseek-r1:8b Deepseek is the most popular open source model right now. It was created by the eponymous Chinese company. It made the news by beating numerous benchmarks while being trained on a budget that is probably lower than the compensation of some OpenAI workers. The 8b variant only weights 5.2 GB and runs decently on limited hardware, like my three years old Mac. This model is famous for forgetting about world events from 1989, but also seems to have a few issues when faced with concrete coding tasks. It is a reasoning model, meaning it “thinks” before acting, which should lead to improved accuracy. In practice, it regularly gets stuck indefinitely searching where it should start and jumping from one problem to the other in a loop. This can happen even on simple problems, and made it unusable for me. mistral:7b Mistral is the French alternative to American and Chinese models. I have already talked about their 7b model on this blog. It is worth noting that they have kept updating their models, and it should now be much more accurate than two years ago. Mistral is not a reasoning model, so it will jump straight to answering. This is very good if you’re working with tasks where speed and low compute use are a priority. Sadly, the accuracy doesn’t seem good enough for coding. Even on simple tasks, it will hallucinate functions or randomly delete parts of the code I didn’t want to touch. qwen3:8b Another model from China, qwen3 was created by the folks at Alibaba. It also claims impressive benchmark results, and can work as both a reasoning or non-thinking model. It was made with modern AI tooling in mind, by supporting MCPs and a framework for agentic development. This model actually seems to work as expected, providing somewhat accurate code output while not hanging in the reasoning part. Since it runs decently on my local setup, I decided to stick to that model for now. Setting up a local API with Ollama Ollama is now the default way to download and run local LLMs. It can be simply installed by downloading it from their website. Once installed, it works like Docker for models, by giving us access to commands like pull, run, or rm. Ollama will expose an API on localhost which can be used by other programs. For example, you can use it from your Python programs through ollama-python. Pair programming with aider The next piece of software I installed is aider. I assume it’s pronounced like the French word, but I could not confirm that. Aider describes itself as a “pair programming” application. Its main job is to pass context to the model, let it write the output to files, run linters, and commit the changes. Getting started It can be installed using the official Python package or via Homebrew if you use Mac. Once it is installed, just navigate to your code repository and launch it: export OLLAMA_API_BASE=http://127.0.0.1:11434 aider --model ollama_chat/qwen3:8b The CLI should automatically create some configuration files and add them to the repo’s .gitignore. Usage Aider isn’t meant to be left alone in complete autonomy. You’ll have to guide the AI through the process of making changes to your repository. To start, use the /add command to add files you want to focus on. Those files will be passed entirely to the model’s context and the model will be able to write in them. You can then ask questions using the /ask command. If you want to generate code, a good strategy can be to starting by requesting a plan of actions. When you want it to actually write to the files, you can prompt it using the /code command. This is also the default mode. There’s no absolute guarantee that it will follow a plan if you agreed on one previously, but it is still a good idea to have one. The /architect command seems to automatically ask for a plan, accept it, and write the code. The specificity of this command is that it lets you use different models to plan and write the changes. Refactoring I tried coding with aider in a few situations to see how it performs in practice. First, I tried making it do a simple refactoring on Itako, which is a project of average complexity. When pointed to the exact part of code where the issues happened, and explained explicitly what to do, the model managed to change the target struct according to the instructions. It did unexpectedly change a function that was outside the scope of what I asked, but this was easy to spot. On paper, this looks like a success. In practice, the time spent crafting a prompt, waiting for the AI to run and fixing the small issue that came up immensely exceeds the 10 minutes it would have taken me to edit the file myself. I don’t think coding that way would lead me to a massive performance improvement for now. Greenfield project For a second scenario, I wanted to see how it would perform on a brand-new project. I quickly set up a Python virtual environment, and asked aider to work with me at building a simple project. We would be opening a file containing Japanese text, parsing it with fugashi, and counting the words. To my surprise, this was a disaster. All I got was a bunch on hallucination riddled python that wouldn’t run under any circumstances. It may be that the lack of context actually made it harder for the model to generate code. Troubleshooting Finally, I went back to Itako, and decided to check how it would perform on common troubleshooting tasks. I introduced a few bugs to my code and gathered some error messages. I then proceeded to simply give aider the files mentioned by the error message and just use /ask to have it explain the errors to me, without requiring it to implement the code. This part did work very well. If I compare it with Googling unknown error messages, I think this can cut the time spent on the issue by half This is not just because Google is getting worse every day, but the model having access to the actual code does give it a massive advantage. I do think this setup is something I can use instead of the occasional frustration of scrolling through StackOverflow threads when something unexpected breaks. What about the Qwen CLI? With everyone jumping on the trend of CLI tools for LLMs, the Qwen team released its own Qwen Code. It can be installed using npm, and connects to a local model if configured like this: export OPENAI_API_KEY="ollama" export OPENAI_BASE_URL="http://localhost:11434/v1/" export OPENAI_MODEL="qwen3:8b" Compared to aider, it aims at being fully autonomous. For example, it will search your repository using grep. However, I didn’t manage to get it to successfully write any code. The tool seems optimized for larger, online models, with context sizes up to 1M tokens. Our local qwen3 context only has a 40k tokens context size, which can get overwhelmed very quickly when browsing entire code repositories. Even when I didn’t run out of context, the tool mysteriously failed when trying to write files. It insists it can only write to absolute paths, which the model doesn’t seem to agree with providing. I did not investigate the issue further.
Kubernetes is not exactly the most fun piece of technology around. Learning it isn’t easy, and learning the surrounding ecosystem is even harder. Even those who have managed to tame it are still afraid of getting paged by an ETCD cluster corruption, a Kubelet certificate expiration, or the DNS breaking down (and somehow, it’s always the DNS). Samuel Sianipar If you’re like me, the thought of making your own orchestrator has crossed your mind a few times. The result would, of course, be a magical piece of technology that is both simple to learn and wouldn’t break down every weekend. Sadly, the task seems daunting. Kubernetes is a multi-million lines of code project which has been worked on for more than a decade. The good thing is someone wrote a book that can serve as a good starting point to explore the idea of building our own container orchestrator. This book is named “Build an Orchestrator in Go”, written by Tim Boring, published by Manning. The tasks The basic unit of our container orchestrator is called a “task”. A task represents a single container. It contains configuration data, like the container’s name, image and exposed ports. Most importantly, it indicates the container state, and so acts as a state machine. The state of a task can be Pending, Scheduled, Running, Completed or Failed. Each task will need to interact with a container runtime, through a client. In the book, we use Docker (aka Moby). The client will get its configuration from the task and then proceed to pull the image, create the container and start it. When it is time to finish the task, it will stop the container and remove it. The workers Above the task, we have workers. Each machine in the cluster runs a worker. Workers expose an API through which they receive commands. Those commands are added to a queue to be processed asynchronously. When the queue gets processed, the worker will start or stop tasks using the container client. In addition to exposing the ability to start and stop tasks, the worker must be able to list all the tasks running on it. This demands keeping a task database in the worker’s memory and updating it every time a task change’s state. The worker also needs to be able to provide information about its resources, like the available CPU and memory. The book suggests reading the /proc Linux file system using goprocinfo, but since I use a Mac, I used gopsutil. The manager On top of our cluster of workers, we have the manager. The manager also exposes an API, which allows us to start, stop, and list tasks on the cluster. Every time we want to create a new task, the manager will call a scheduler component. The scheduler has to list the workers that can accept more tasks, assign them a score by suitability and return the best one. When this is done, the manager will send the work to be done using the worker’s API. In the book, the author also suggests that the manager component should keep track of every tasks state by performing regular health checks. Health checks typically consist of querying an HTTP endpoint (i.e. /ready) and checking if it returns 200. In case a health check fails, the manager asks the worker to restart the task. I’m not sure if I agree with this idea. This could lead to the manager and worker having differing opinions about a task state. It will also cause scaling issues: the manager workload will have to grow linearly as we add tasks, and not just when we add workers. As far as I know, in Kubernetes, Kubelet (the equivalent of the worker here) is responsible for performing health checks. The CLI The last part of the project is to create a CLI to make sure our new orchestrator can be used without having to resort to firing up curl. The CLI needs to implement the following features: start a worker start a manager run a task in the cluster stop a task get the task status get the worker node status Using cobra makes this part fairly straightforward. It lets you create very modern feeling command-line apps, with properly formatted help commands and easy argument parsing. Once this is done, we almost have a fully functional orchestrator. We just need to add authentication. And maybe some kind of DaemonSet implementation would be nice. And a way to handle mounting volumes…
In the past few years, social media use has gained a bad reputation. More or less everyone is now aware that TikTok is ruining your attention span, and Twitter is radicalizing you into extreme ideologies. But, despite its enormous popularity amongst technology enthusiasts, there’s not a lot of attention given to Discord. I personally have been using Discord so much for so long that the majority of my social circle is made of people I met through the platform. I even spent two years of my life helping run the infrastructure behind the most popular Bot available on Discord. In this article, I will try to give my perspective on Discord, why I think it is harmful, and what can we do about it. appshunter.io A tale of two book clubs To explain my point of view about Discord, I will compare the experience between joining a real-life book-club, and one that communicates exclusively through Discord. This example is about books, but the same issues would apply if it was a community talking about investing, knitting, or collecting stamps. As Marshall McLuhan showed last century, examining media should be done independently of their content. In the first scenario, we have Bob. Bob enjoys reading books, which is generally a solitary hobby. To break this solitude, Bob decides to join a book club. This book club reunites twice a month in a library where they talk about a new book each time. In the second scenario, we have Alice. Alice also likes books. Alice also wants to meet fellow book lovers. Being a nerd, Alice decides to join a Discord server. This server does not have fixed meeting times. Most users simply use the text channels to talk about what they are reading anytime during the day. Crumbs of Belongingness In Bob’s book club, a session typically lasts an hour. First, the librarian takes some time to welcome everyone and introduce newcomers. After, that each club member talks about the book they were expected to read. They can talk about what they liked and disliked, how the book made them feel, and the chapters they found particularly noteworthy. Once each member had the time to talk about the book, they vote on the book they are going to read for the next date. After the session is concluded, some members move to the nearest coffeehouse to keep talking. During this session of one hour, Bob spent around one hour socializing. The need for belongingness that drove Bob to join this book club is fully met. On Alice’s side, the server is running 24/7. When she opens the app, even if there are sometimes more than 4000 members of her virtual book club online, most of the time, nobody is talking. If she was to spend an entire hour staring at the server she might witness a dozen or so messages. Those messages may be part of small conversations in which Alice can take part. Sadly, most of the time they will be simple uploads of memes, conversations about books she hasn’t read, or messages that do not convey enough meaning to start a conversation. In one hour of constant Discord use, Alice’s need for socializing has not been met. Susan Q Yin The shop is closed Even if Bob’s library is open every day, the book club is only open for a total of two hours a month. It is enough for Bob. Since the book club fulfills his need, he doesn’t want it to be around for longer. He has not even entertained the thought of joining a second book club, because too many meetings would be overwhelming. For Alice, Discord is always available. No matter if she is at home or away, it is always somewhere in her phone or taskbar. At any moment of the day, she might notice a red circle above the icon. It tells her there are unread messages on Discord. When she notices that, she instinctively stops her current task and opens the app to spend a few minutes checking her messages. Most of the time those messages do not lead to a meaningful conversation. Reading a few messages isn’t enough to meet her need for socialization. So, after having scrolled through the messages, she goes back to waiting for the next notification. Each time she interrupts her current task to check Discord, getting back into the flow can take several minutes or not happen at all. This can easily happen dozens of times a day and cost Alice hundreds of hours each month. Book hopping When Bob gets home, the club only requires him to read the next book. He may also choose to read two books at the same time, one for the book club and one from his personal backlog. But, if he were to keep his efforts to a strict minimum, he would still have things to talk about in the next session. Alice wants to be able to talk with other users about the books they are reading. So she starts reading the books that are trending and get mentionned often. The issue is, Discord’s conversation are instantaneous, and instantaneity compresses time. A book isn’t going to stay popular and relevant for two whole weeks, if it manages to be the thing people talk about for two whole days, it’s already great. Alice might try to purchase and read two to three books a week to keep up with the server rythm. Even if books are not terribly expensive, this can turn a 20 $/month hobby into a 200 $/month hobby. In addition to that, if reading a book takes Alice on average 10 hours, reading 3 books a week would be like adding a part-time job to her schedule. All this, while being constantly interrupted by the need to check if new conversations have been posted to the server. visnu deva Quitting Discord If you are in Alice’s situation, the solution is quite simple: use Discord less, ideally not at all. On my side, I’ve left every server that is not relevant to my current work. I blocked discord.com from the DNS of my coding computer (using NextDNS) and uninstalled the app from my phone. This makes the platform only usable as a direct messaging app, exclusively from my gaming device, which I cannot carry with me. I think many people realize the addictive nature of Discord, yet keep using the application all the time. One common objection to quitting the platform, is that there’s a need for an alternative: maybe we should go back to forums, or IRC, or use Matrix, etc… I don’t think any alternative internet chat platform can solve the problem. The real problem is that we want to be able to talk to people without leaving home, at any time, without any inconvenience. But what we should do is exactly that, leave home and join a real book club, one that is not open 24/7, and one where the members take the time to listen to each other. In the software community, we have also been convinced that every one of our projects needs to be on Discord. Every game needs a server, open-source projects offer support on Discord, and a bunch of AI startups even use it as their main user interface. I even made a server for Dice’n Goblins. I don’t think it’s really that useful. I’m not even sure it’s that convenient. Popular games are not popular because they have big servers, they have big servers because they are popular. Successful open-source projects often don’t even have a server.
Two weeks ago we released Dice’n Goblins, our first game on Steam. This project allowed me to discover and learn a lot of new things about game development and the industry. I will use this blog post to write down what I consider to be the most important lessons from the months spent working on this. The development started around 2 years ago when Daphnée started prototyping a dungeon crawler featuring a goblin protagonist. After a few iterations, the game combat started featuring dice, and then those dice could be used to make combos. In May 2024, the game was baptized Dice’n Goblins, and a Steam page was created featuring some early gameplay screenshots and footage. I joined the project full-time around this period. Almost one year later, after amassing more than 8000 wishlists, the game finally released on Steam on April 4th, 2025. It was received positively by the gaming press, with great reviews from PCGamer and LadiesGamers. It now sits at 92% positive reviews from players on Steam. Building RPGs isn’t easy As you can see from the above timeline, building this game took almost two years and two programmers. This is actually not that long if you consider that other indie RPGs have taken more than 6 years to come out. The main issue with the genre is that you need to create a believable world. In practice, this requires programming many different systems that will interact together to give the impression of a cohesive universe. Every time you add a new system, you need to think about how it will fit all the existing game features. For example, players typically expect an RPG to have a shop system. Of course, this means designing a shop non-player character (or building) and creating a UI that is displayed when you interact with it. But this also means thinking through a lot of other systems: combat needs to be changed to reward the player with gold, every item needs a price tag, chests should sometimes reward the player with gold, etc… Adding too many systems can quickly get into scope creep territory, and make the development exponentially longer. But you can only get away with removing so much until your game stops being an RPG. Making a game without a shop might be acceptable, but the experience still needs to have more features than “walking around and fighting monsters” to feel complete. RPGs are also, by definition, narrative experiences. While some games have managed to get away with procedurally generating 90% of the content, in general, you’ll need to get your hands dirty, write a story, and design a bunch of maps. Creating enough content for a game to fit 12h+ without having the player go through repetitive grind will by itself take a lot of time. Having said all that, I definitely wouldn’t do any other kind of games than RPGs, because this is what I enjoy playing. I don’t think I would be able to nail what makes other genres fun if I don’t play them enough to understand what separates the good from the mediocre. Marketing isn’t that complicated Everyone in the game dev community knows that there are way too many games releasing on Steam. To stand out amongst the 50+ games coming out every day, it’s important not only to have a finished product but also to plan a marketing campaign well in advance. For most people coming from a software engineering background, like me, this can feel extremely daunting. Our education and jobs do not prepare us well for this kind of task. In practice, it’s not that complicated. If your brain is able to provision a Kubernetes cluster, then you are most definitely capable of running a marketing campaign. Like anything else, it’s a skill that you can learn over time by practicing it, and iteratively improving your methods. During the 8 months following the Steam page release, we tried basically everything you can think of as a way to promote the game. Every time something was having a positive impact, we would do it more, and we quickly stopped things with low impact. The most important thing to keep in mind is your target audience. If you know who wants the game of games you’re making, it is very easy to find where they hang out and talk to them. This is however not an easy question to answer for every game. For a long while, we were not sure who would like Dice’n Goblins. Is it people who like Etrian Odyssey? Fans of Dicey Dungeons? Nostalgic players of Paper Mario? For us, the answer was mostly #1, with a bit of #3. Once we figured out what was our target audience, how to communicate with them, and most importantly, had a game that was visually appealing enough, marketing became very straightforward. This is why we really struggled to get our first 1000 wishlists, but getting the last 5000 was actually not that complicated. Publishers aren’t magic At some point, balancing the workload of actually building the game and figuring out how to market it felt too much for a two-person team. We therefore did what many indie studios do, and decided to work with a publisher. We worked with Rogue Duck Interactive, who previously published Dice & Fold, a fairly successful dice roguelike. Without getting too much into details, it didn’t work out as planned and we decided, by mutual agreement, to go back to self-publishing Dice’n Goblins. The issue simply came from the audience question mentioned earlier. Even though Dice & Fold and Dice’n Goblins share some similarities, they target a different audience, which requires a completely different approach to marketing. The lesson learned is that when picking a publisher, the most important thing you can do is to check that their current game catalog really matches the idea you have of your own game. If you’re building a fast-paced FPS, a publisher that only has experience with cozy simulation games will not be able to help you efficiently. In our situation, a publisher with experience in roguelikes and casual strategy games wasn’t a good fit for an RPG. In addition to that, I don’t think the idea of using a publisher to remove marketing toil and focus on making the game is that much of a good idea in the long term. While it definitely helps to remove the pressure from handling social media accounts and ad campaigns, new effort will be required in communicating and negotiating with the publishing team. In the end, the difference between the work saved and the work gained might not have been worth selling a chunk of your game. Conclusion After all this was said and done, one big question I haven’t answered is: would I do it again? The answer is definitely yes. Not only building this game was an extremely satisfying endeavor, but so much has been learned and built while doing it, it would be a shame not to go ahead and do a second one.
Neovim is by far my favorite text editor. The clutter-free interface and keyboard-only navigation are what keep me productive in my daily programming. In an earlier post, I explained how I configure it into a minimalist development environment. Today, I will show you how to use it with Godot and GDScript. Configure Godot First, we need to tell Godot to use nvim as a text editor instead of the built-in one. Open Godot, and head to Editor Settings > General > Text Editor > External. There, you will need to tick the box Use external editor, indicate your Neovim installation path, and use --server /tmp/godothost --remote-send "<C-\><C-N>:n {file}<CR>{line}G{col}|" as execution flags. While in the settings, head to Network > Language Server and note down the remote port Godot is using. By default, it should be 6005. We will need that value later. Connecting to Godot with vim-godot Neovim will be able to access Godot features by using a plugin called vim-godot. We will need to edit the nvim configuration file to install plugins and configure Neovim. On Mac and Linux, it is located at ~/.config/nvim/init.vim I use vim-plug to manage my plugins, so I can just add it to my configuration like this: call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged') " ... Plug 'habamax/vim-godot' " ... call plug#end() Once the configuration file is modified and saved, use the :PlugInstall command to install it. You’ll also need to indicate Godot’s executable path. Add this line to your init.vim: let g:godot_executable = '/Applications/Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot' For vim-godot to communicate with the Godot editor, it will need to listen to the /tmp/godothost file we configured in the editor previously. To do that, simply launch nvim with the flag --listen /tmp/godothost. To save you some precious keypress, I suggest creating a new alias in your bashrc/zshrc like this: alias gvim="nvim --listen /tmp/godothost" Getting autocompletion with coc.nvim Godot ships with a language server. It means the Godot editor can provide autocompletion, syntax highlighting, and advanced navigation to external editors like nvim. While Neovim now has built-in support for the language server protocol, I’ve used the plugin coc.nvim to obtain these functionalities for years and see no reason to change. You can also install it with vim-plug by adding the following line to your plugin list: Plug 'neoclide/coc.nvim', {'branch':'release'} Run :PlugInstall again to install it. You’ll need to indicate the Godot language server address and port using the command :CocConfig. It should open Coc’s configuration file, which is a JSON file normally located at ~/.config/nvim/coc-settings.json. In this file enter the following data, and make sure the port number matches the one located in your editor: { "languageserver": { "godot": { "host": "127.0.0.1", "filetypes": ["gdscript"], "port": 6005 } } } I recommend adding Coc’s example configuration to your init.vim file. You can find it on GitHub. It will provide you with a lot of useful shortcuts, such as using gd to go to a function definition and gr to list its references. Debugging using nvim-dap If you want to use the debugger from inside Neovim, you’ll need to install another plugin called nvim-dap. Add the following to your plugins list: Plug 'mfussenegger/nvim-dap' The plugin authors suggest configuring it using Lua, so let’s do that by adding the following in your init.vim: lua <<EOF local dap = require("dap") dap.adapters.godot = { type = "server", host = "127.0.0.1", port = 6006, } dap.configurations.gdscript = { { type = "godot", request = "launch", name = "Launch scene", project = "${workspaceFolder}", launch_scene = true, }, } vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("Breakpoint", "lua require'dap'.toggle_breakpoint()", {}) vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("Continue", "lua require'dap'.continue()", {}) vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("StepOver", "lua require'dap'.step_over()", {}) vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("StepInto", "lua require'dap'.step_into()", {}) vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("REPL", "lua require'dap'.repl.open()", {}) EOF This will connect to the language server (here on port 6005), and allow you to pilot the debugger using the following commands: :Breakpoint to create (or remove) a breakpoint :Continue to launch the game or run until the next breakpoint :StepOver to step over a line :StepInto to step inside a function definition :REPL to launch a REPL (useful if you want to examine values) Conclusion I hope you’ll have a great time developing Godot games with Neovim. If it helps you, you can check out my entire init.vim file on GitHub gist.
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What does it mean when someone writes that a programming language is “strongly typed”? I’ve known for many years that “strongly typed” is a poorly-defined term. Recently I was prompted on Lobsters to explain why it’s hard to understand what someone means when they use the phrase. I came up with more than five meanings! how strong? The various meanings of “strongly typed” are not clearly yes-or-no. Some developers like to argue that these kinds of integrity checks must be completely perfect or else they are entirely worthless. Charitably (it took me a while to think of a polite way to phrase this), that betrays a lack of engineering maturity. Software engineers, like any engineers, have to create working systems from imperfect materials. To do so, we must understand what guarantees we can rely on, where our mistakes can be caught early, where we need to establish processes to catch mistakes, how we can control the consequences of our mistakes, and how to remediate when somethng breaks because of a mistake that wasn’t caught. strong how? So, what are the ways that a programming language can be strongly or weakly typed? In what ways are real programming languages “mid”? Statically typed as opposed to dynamically typed? Many languages have a mixture of the two, such as run time polymorphism in OO languages (e.g. Java), or gradual type systems for dynamic languages (e.g. TypeScript). Sound static type system? It’s common for static type systems to be deliberately unsound, such as covariant subtyping in arrays or functions (Java, again). Gradual type systems migh have gaping holes for usability reasons (TypeScript, again). And some type systems might be unsound due to bugs. (There are a few of these in Rust.) Unsoundness isn’t a disaster, if a programmer won’t cause it without being aware of the risk. For example: in Lean you can write “sorry” as a kind of “to do” annotation that deliberately breaks soundness; and Idris 2 has type-in-type so it accepts Girard’s paradox. Type safe at run time? Most languages have facilities for deliberately bypassing type safety, with an “unsafe” library module or “unsafe” language features, or things that are harder to spot. It can be more or less difficult to break type safety in ways that the programmer or language designer did not intend. JavaScript and Lua are very safe, treating type safety failures as security vulnerabilities. Java and Rust have controlled unsafety. In C everything is unsafe. Fewer weird implicit coercions? There isn’t a total order here: for instance, C has implicit bool/int coercions, Rust does not; Rust has implicit deref, C does not. There’s a huge range in how much coercions are a convenience or a source of bugs. For example, the PHP and JavaScript == operators are made entirely of WAT, but at least you can use === instead. How fancy is the type system? To what degree can you model properties of your program as types? Is it convenient to parse, not validate? Is the Curry-Howard correspondance something you can put into practice? Or is it only capable of describing the physical layout of data? There are probably other meanings, e.g. I have seen “strongly typed” used to mean that runtime representations are abstract (you can’t see the underlying bytes); or in the past it sometimes meant a language with a heavy type annotation burden (as a mischaracterization of static type checking). how to type So, when you write (with your keyboard) the phrase “strongly typed”, delete it, and come up with a more precise description of what you really mean. The desiderata above are partly overlapping, sometimes partly orthogonal. Some of them you might care about, some of them not. But please try to communicate where you draw the line and how fuzzy your line is.
(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.
In 2020, Apple released the M1 with a custom GPU. We got to work reverse-engineering the hardware and porting Linux. Today, you can run Linux on a range of M1 and M2 Macs, with almost all hardware working: wireless, audio, and full graphics acceleration. Our story begins in December 2020, when Hector Martin kicked off Asahi Linux. I was working for Collabora working on Panfrost, the open source Mesa3D driver for Arm Mali GPUs. Hector put out a public call for guidance from upstream open source maintainers, and I bit. I just intended to give some quick pointers. Instead, I bought myself a Christmas present and got to work. In between my university coursework and Collabora work, I poked at the shader instruction set. One thing led to another. Within a few weeks, I drew a triangle. In 3D graphics, once you can draw a triangle, you can do anything. Pretty soon, I started work on a shader compiler. After my final exams that semester, I took a few days off from Collabora to bring up an OpenGL driver capable of spinning gears with my new compiler. Over the next year, I kept reverse-engineering and improving the driver until it could run 3D games on macOS. Meanwhile, Asahi Lina wrote a kernel driver for the Apple GPU. My userspace OpenGL driver ran on macOS, leaving her kernel driver as the missing piece for an open source graphics stack. In December 2022, we shipped graphics acceleration in Asahi Linux. In January 2023, I started my final semester in my Computer Science program at the University of Toronto. For years I juggled my courses with my part-time job and my hobby driver. I faced the same question as my peers: what will I do after graduation? Maybe Panfrost? I started reverse-engineering of the Mali Midgard GPU back in 2017, when I was still in high school. That led to an internship at Collabora in 2019 once I graduated, turning into my job throughout four years of university. During that time, Panfrost grew from a kid’s pet project based on blackbox reverse-engineering, to a professional driver engineered by a team with Arm’s backing and hardware documentation. I did what I set out to do, and the project succeeded beyond my dreams. It was time to move on. What did I want to do next? Finish what I started with the M1. Ship a great driver. Bring full, conformant OpenGL drivers to the M1. Apple’s drivers are not conformant, but we should strive for the industry standard. Bring full, conformant Vulkan to Apple platforms, disproving the myth that Vulkan isn’t suitable for Apple hardware. Bring Proton gaming to Asahi Linux. Thanks to Valve’s work for the Steam Deck, Windows games can run better on Linux than even on Windows. Why not reap those benefits on the M1? Panfrost was my challenge until we “won”. My next challenge? Gaming on Linux on M1. Once I finished my coursework, I started full-time on gaming on Linux. Within a month, we shipped OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux. A few weeks later, we passed official conformance for OpenGL ES 3.1. That put us at feature parity with Panfrost. I wanted to go further. OpenGL (ES) 3.2 requires geometry shaders, a legacy feature not supported by either Arm or Apple hardware. The proprietary OpenGL drivers emulate geometry shaders with compute, but there was no open source prior art to borrow. Even though multiple Mesa drivers need geometry/tessellation emulation, nobody did the work to get there. My early progress on OpenGL was fast thanks to the mature common code in Mesa. It was time to pay it forward. Over the rest of the year, I implemented geometry/tessellation shader emulation. And also the rest of the owl. In January 2024, I passed conformance for the full OpenGL 4.6 specification, finishing up OpenGL. Vulkan wasn’t too bad, either. I polished the OpenGL driver for a few months, but once I started typing a Vulkan driver, I passed 1.3 conformance in a few weeks. What remained was wiring up the geometry/tessellation emulation to my shiny new Vulkan driver, since those are required for Direct3D. Et voilà, Proton games. Along the way, Karol Herbst passed OpenCL 3.0 conformance on the M1, running my compiler atop his “rusticl” frontend. Meanwhile, when the Vulkan 1.4 specification was published, we were ready and shipped a conformant implementation on the same day. After that, I implemented sparse texture support, unlocking Direct3D 12 via Proton. …Now what? Ship a great driver? Check. Conformant OpenGL 4.6, OpenGL ES 3.2, and OpenCL 3.0? Check. Conformant Vulkan 1.4? Check. Proton gaming? Check. That’s a wrap. We’ve succeeded beyond my dreams. The challenges I chased, I have tackled. The drivers are fully upstream in Mesa. Performance isn’t too bad. With the Vulkan on Apple myth busted, conformant Vulkan is now coming to macOS via LunarG’s KosmicKrisp project building on my work. Satisfied, I am now stepping away from the Apple ecosystem. My friends in the Asahi Linux orbit will carry the torch from here. As for me? Onto the next challenge!
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.
