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Recently, I got an email from a reader who noted that I hadn't published anything in a little while, and he said he hopes I'm doing well. The truth is, some days I am and some days I'm not. I want to share a little bit about what's been going on, and what the future looks like. This is a pretty vulnerable post, so here's the deal. I'm going to tell you this, but it's just between you and me, okay? And there's one condition: you don't reach out to me to say "I'm so sorry!" When people share stories like this, it's often met with pitying responses. These often serve to make the sender feel better, not the recipient, and it feels bad to receive. I much prefer genuine connection from people who've had or seen similar experiences, or understand what I went through, or are facing something similar. I usually write my posts to educate, entertain, or a mixture of the two. This one is different. I'm not writing it to ask for pity or sympathy, but it's also not educational, and it probably won't be entertaining in a "this is fun to read" sense. The main thing I'm looking for here is connection, and maybe giving someone else on a similar journey something to hold onto. So here I am. I'm alive, and I'm writing this post. It's the first post I've written in over four months. That's the longest break I've taken from writing blog posts since I started writing regularly in 2022. What happened? what happened? enter: pain I've had nerve pain and tingling on-and-off since 2022. It was in my hands and forearms, and it was really sharp and really strong. If I type on a regular keyboard, this comes back with a vengeance. Instead, I started using Talon Voice for all my writing and coding, and eventually got a Keyboardio Model 100 which helps me mitigate the pain. The pain would only come on when it was triggered by certain conditions. A physical therapist eventually figured out some shoulder positions were contributing. I knew my keyboard was contributing. If I did something the wrong way, I'd be in pain for days afterwards, but if I did everything just right, I'd go months without any pain. The pain was with me when I started blogging regularly. The first posts in my weekly cadence were all written using my voice, not my hands. I committed code at work, pair programmed, wrote design docs, and was a very effective software engineer and leader. The pain was a little distracting, but it was not debilitating as long as I took care of my body. Accessibility tech saved my career, truly, and reduced my pain dramatically. I could not have gotten through the last four years of gainful employment without Talon, my keyboard, and the portable ergonomic setup I designed. I settled into a comfortable existence in my life: I had this oddball setup, it made me quirky but in a fun way. But then things got much worse. neurology, part 1 A year ago, I started to notice some other symptoms. They were tolerable and not very distressing. But since they were a change in something that was stable, and pointed to different potential causes than the presumed diagnosis, I wanted to get checked out to be cautious. I got a referral to neurology, and went to one of the best neurology departments in my area. We ran a lot of tests, and didn't find anything wrong. This was supposed to be relief, because it meant nothing was progressive: I shouldn't expect it to get worse, certainly not quickly. (Is this foreshadowing? It sure is!) It was also a little frustrating, because it meant we still didn't know why I had these weird sensations and pain. Three years in, no diagnosis. My doctor told me to follow up with her in a few months, and we'll keep monitoring this. I didn't follow up, because I was recovering from a planned surgery, and I was feeling pretty good. That didn't last. business ramps up A few months after my surgery, I left my job of 8 years and started my business! This was a milestone I was working toward for a while, and I was excited to dive in. I loaded up my calendar with chats. Work came in from one client, developing some software in an industry that is very privacy and security conscious. Other friends and acquaintances were happy to chat with me, and some promising leads came up. Some clients came in asking for coaching, too. Things looked so good and promising for me and my business. more tests At the same time my business was starting to ramp up, so were my nerve issues. The pain started to ramp up, and so did some unsettling sensations in my peripheral nerves. This time was different. Instead of something that I could manage and mitigate on my own, it would take over my life. But I didn't know that just yet. At this point in the story, it just felt annoying. I got an appointment with my neurologist, and went back in. She ordered more tests, and we discussed medication to manage the symptoms. Yet again, the tests said everything is normal, when my doctor and I could both clearly see that it was very much not normal. Meanwhile, the pain got worse. A month after that appointment, I was constantly at 6 or 7 on the pain scale[1]. I couldn't feel temperature in my hands, and my fingers were a little numb. My feet were burning most of the time. And I had so much brain fog that I wasn't sure if I could code a hello world example. I wasn't capable of working even one hour in a week. And we didn't know why, or what was happening to me. The only thing we could do was monitor symptoms more, and cover them up. And so I started medication. It helped, a little bit, maybe. I started using a TENS unit. It helped, for the time it was on. I started physical therapy. It helped, being forced to exercise. I worked with a dietitian nutritionist. It helped resolve other symptoms, improved quality of life. I landed a bigger client, and ramped up my work hours. I'd go through times when I worked too many hours, landing myself back on bed rest for a couple of days after. Six hours was too many. Three was maybe doable. My life felt like it was over, in a lot of ways. But we kept working on it, and adjusted my medication. Eventually, I felt mostly okay again. stable With the right medication, dietary changes, physical therapy, and (attempts at) relaxation, I got to what felt like a stable point. (Again with that foreshadowing!) I was able to take on more clients, and work more hours. That's where I am today, mostly. I say mostly because, well, today I'm actually in pain again. I've had the weird nerve symptom precursors on and off a lot recently. My fatigue is at the gate, held off for now but waiting to storm the keep. I'm writing this post with pain in my arms, but I'm typing, and that doesn't seem to make it worse. Neurology and I continue to be besties, working on our mutual hobby of debugging the weird things my body decides to do. I finally had some blood tests which were out of band one way, then the other way. I am having new symptoms, which gives us more leads to pull on. I'm still in pain, sometimes, but it's bearable and not constant. I am able to do more work every day than I have since the middle of last year. But it feels a little bit precarious. That's the life of having a chronic illness and chronic pain, especially when you don't have a diagnosis and you don't know the triggers. I have a really good life. Business is going well enough that I'm able to comfortably support my family. (That said: please do give me more business!) My personal life is also going well. And I'm making some beautiful poetry and music. I cherish this life. I'm drinking in every minute I can. I don't know if I have one more year of playing my saxophone, or sixty more. So I'm going to enjoy it and be in the now, and worry about tomorrow, tomorrow. what's next on the blog? It's probably clear that I'm not coming back to weekly blog posts. Or that if I do, it's not going to be something I can rely on doing for the long haul. But I'm finally well enough that I do have the urge to write again. The urge to dive deep into tech and do weird things with it, just to horrify you all. I'm honestly not sure what's next. I have a few ideas I want to work on, but my time is limited. My business is taking a lot of my energy, as are my personal life and some medical needs. I might end up writing more things like this. Essays that wind through a personal topic. Dives into things like Lyme disease tests and the ways in which they're broken. Explainers about all the different pain scales. And I might end up writing tech posts. Explain something that I learned recently. Make a silly, terrible idea come to life, and subject you to it share it with you. Expound on leadership topics and the human side of tech. But when will it happen? I really don't know. I had quietly launched a Patreon page this year, and I've shut that down, since I can't keep that up with all of *gestures at her body's shenanigans* this. A dream I had, and still have, is to be able to make a living from my creative endeavors. That dream seems like it will remain just a dream, but things can always change. * * * And yet. And yet, I'm happy. Dreams are great, but they can't hold a candle to life itself. Life's pretty rad. In the last few months, I've written more poetry than ever before in my life. Better poetry. Meaningful poetry, silly poetry, poems about booty calls and poems about grief. My music has taken on more expression and more meaning. I've been able to write instrumental pieces that authentically communicate an arc I had through trauma and recovery. Connections with people have formed, and deepened. New people have entered my life, enriching it more than I could ever have imagined. Old friends have shown me so much love and support through my hardest moments. This isn't what I thought my life would look like. It's both harder and better than I'd ever dared to wish for. If you're wondering, I think this one from Alberta Health Services is the clearest, most useful pain scale. ↩
I have some weird hobbies, and one of those is opening up the network tab on just about anything I'm using. Sometimes, I find egregious problems. Usually, this is something that can be fixed, when responsibly reported. But over time, I learned a bitter lesson: sometimes, you can't get it fixed. Tracking my package Recently, I was waiting for a time-sensitive delivery of medication. It used a courier company which focused on just delivering prescription medications. I opened up the tracking page on my computer, and saw the information I wanted: the medication would probably arrive around 6 PM. But... what if there's more? And what are they doing with my data? Can anyone else see it? So I peeked at the network tools, and was disappointed by what I saw. The first time this happened, I was surprised. By now, I expect to see this. And what I saw was every customer's address along the delivery route. I also saw how much the courier would get paid per stop, what their hourly rate was, and the driver's GPS coordinates (though these were sometimes missing). After the package was delivered, the tracking page changed and displayed a feedback form, my signature, and a picture of my porch. The JSON payload no longer included the entire route, but it included my address, and the payload from an easily guessable related endpoint did still contain the entire route. And that route? It included other recipients' ids, which can be used to find their home addresses, names, contents of the package (sometimes), a photo of their porch, and a copy of their signature. Um. This is bad, right? Resposibly disclosing the vulnerability I've actually found approximately this vulnerability in two separate couriers' tracking pages (and they're using different software). One of them was even worse for them, it included their Stripe private key, I suppose as a bug bounty for people without ethics. And each time I find it, I try to report it. And I fail. They don't let me report it. These companies don't list security contacts. The staff I can find on LinkedIn or their website don't have email addresses that I can find or guess. Mail sent to the addresses I do find listed has all bounced. I tried going through back channels. I messaged the pharmacy which was using this courier. I talked to my prescriber, who was shocked at this issue. And the next time I got a delivery, it came via UPS instead (they do not have a leaky sieve for a tracking page, but they did "lose" my prescription once). But I don't know if they just did that for me, the miscreant who looks at her network tools? Or did they switch everyone over to a different courier? Either way, at least my data was safe now, right? It was, until I started using a different pharmacy, and this one is back to using the leaky couriers again. Sigh. It's not my responsibility to fix this (and I can't) I got pretty upset about this at one point. There's a security issue! Data is being leaked, I must get this fixed! And someone told me something really wise: "it's not your responsibility to fix this, and you've done everything you can (and more than you had to)." And ultimately, she was right. I was getting myself worked up about it, but it's not my responsibility to fix. Sometimes there will be things like this that are bad, that I cannot fix, and that I have to accept. So, where do I go from here? I could probably publicly name-and-shame the couriers, but it would not do anything productive. It would not get their attention to fix it, and it wouldn't be seen by the folks who need to know (pharmacists and prescribers). So I'm not going to disclose the specific company, because the main thing it would do is risk me getting in legal trouble, for dubious benefit. I've already notified the pharmacists and prescribers that I know; it's on them, if they want to let anyone else know.
I'm working on a silly word game right now, which means I need a list of words for it. I can't rely on the system word list, since this is for a web project. I'd also like, ideally, multiple lists of words with different criteria: most common words, all words, some subsets. It's not really clear how many words there are, because what is a word[1]? And how do you find what words are in use? Or decide that something's used enough that it merits being put in a list, rather than just being a misspelling or something used once or twice? You probably don't want every mashing of keys that someone's done in there, or adjklfalkjsdfaklsd and variations are going to take up some considerable space. So that results in a lot of different word lists being available! With that in mind, here are the two best word list sources I found and some of their properties. WordNet: a while back, researchers at Princeton put together WordNet, a database of relations between words. This includes definitions and synonyms and things like that. It's no longer maintained by Princeton, but was forked and maintained with a release 1 month ago. There are libraries to load it. Wortschatz Leipzig frequency lists: A project under Leipzig University, this is a collection of word frequency lists from various sources. The English downloads page has datasets drawn from news, the web, or Wikipedia. And there are two honorable mentions, which I want to call some attention to. These are useful, but not useful for this project. /usr/share/dict/words: Unix systems come with word lists installed, which is handy for things like spellcheckers. On my system, this file contains about 480k words. This is accessible through various libraries, too. Mine does contain things like "1080", so I want something a little cleaner. It's nice to have available! Licensing isn't super clear to me, but it can be figured out and the word list could (with appropriate licensing) then be distributed with the application. Wikitionary: It's available under permissive license terms! There's a page documenting different frequency word lists, which can be used to get the top words from different contexts, like the most common words on wikipedia, in TV scripts, or in contemporary poetry! It doesn't make the cut for me since the data is prepared for human consumption rather than being machine readable. The WordNet data and Leipzig frequency lists both need to be loaded and processed, but the formats are documented and can be implemented pretty easily, especially if you have a specific subset of the data you need. I'll be using the Leipzig data most likely for my silly little word game. I might combine it with WordNet to be able to pull up definitions, but we'll see! Someday I'd like to pull some of the Wikitionary data, because it's really cool and has a lot of different frequency lists. Like the one with the 2000 most common words in contemporary English poetry. That might not make the cut for this project, but that's just crying to be used for something else. For example, I maintain that "apple tree" is a word. "Tall tree" is two: "tall" is an adjective that's used to modify "tree" which is a noun. But that's not true with "apple tree" since, "apple" isn't an adjective, it's another noun. We use "apple tree" as one singular word, and it has its own dictionary entry. I'm only slightly joking. ↩
As I do every year, it's that time to reflect on the year that's been, and talk about some of my hopes and goals for the next year! I'll be honest, this one is harder to write than last year's. It was an emotionally intense year in a lot of ways. Here's to a good 2026! Reflecting on 2025 Where last year I got sick and had time black holes from that, this year I lost time to various planned surgeries. I didn't get nearly as much done, because it was also hard to stay focused with all the attacks on trans rights happening. Without further ado, what'd I get up to? Professional I helped coaching clients land job and improve their lives at work and beyond. I started coaching informally in 2024, and in 2025 I took on some clients formally. During the year, I helped clients improve their skills, build their confidence, and land great new jobs. I also helped clients learn how to balance their work and home life, how to be more productive and focused, and how to navigate a changing industry. This was one of the most rewarding things I did all year. I hope to do more of it this coming year! If you want to explore working together, email me or schedule an intro. I solved interesting problems at work. This reflection is mostly private, because it's so intertwined with work that's confidential. I learned a lot, and also got to see team members blossom into their own leadership roles. It is really fun watching people grow over time. I took on some consulting work. I had some small engagements to consult with clients, and those were really fun. Most of the work was focused on performance-sensitive web apps and networked code, using (naturally) Rust. This is something I'll be expanding this year! I've left my day job and am spinning up my consulting business again. More on that soon, but for now, email me if you want help with software engineering (especially web app performance) or need a principal engineer to step in and provide some engineering leadership. I wrote some good blog posts. This year, my writing output dropped to about 1/3 of what it was last year. Despite the reduction, I wrote some pretty good posts that I'm really happy with! I took a break intentionally to spend some time dealing with everything going on around me, and that helped a lot. I didn't get back to consistent weekly posts, but I intend to in 2026. Personal My hernias were fixed. During previous medical adventures, some hernias were found. I go those fixed[1]! Recovering from hernia repair isn't fun, but wasn't too bad in the long run. It resolved some pain I'd had for a while, which I hadn't realized was unusual pain. (Story of my life, honestly.) Long-awaited surgery! In addition to the hernia repair, I had another planned surgery done. The recovery was long, and is still ongoing. My medical leave was 12 weeks, and I'm going to continue recovering for about the first year in various forms. This has brought me so much deep relief, I can't even put it in words. Performed a 30-minute set at West Philly Porchfest. I did a solo set in West Philly Porchfest! All the arrangements were done by me, and I performed all the parts live (well, one part used a pre-sequenced arpeggiator). I played my wind synth as my main instrument, layering parts over top of myself with a looper, and I also played the drum parts. You can watch a few of the pieces in a YouTube playlist. Wrote and recorded two pieces of original music. This was one of my goals from 2024, and I'm very proud that I got it done. The first piece of music, Anticipation, came from an exercise a music therapist had me do. I took the little vignette and expanded it into a full piece, but more importantly, the exercise gave me an approach to composition. I'd like to rerecord Anticipation sometime, since I've grown as a musician significantly across the year. My second piece I'm even happier with. It's called Little Joys, and I'm just tickled that I was able to write this. I played it on my alto sax (piped through a pedal board) and programmed the other parts using a sequencer. One of my poems was published! I've written a lot more poetry this year. One of my close friends told me that I should get one of them published to have more people read it. They thought it was a good and important poem. That gave me the confidence to submit some poems, and one of them was accepted! (The one they told me to submit was not yet accepted anywhere, but fingers crossed.) You can read my poem, "my voice", in the December issue of Lavender Review. Last year's goals Every year when I write this, I realize I got a lot done. This year was a lot, filled with way more creative output than previous years. How does it stack up against what I wanted to do last year? ❓ Once again, I wanted to keep my rights. It's a perennial goal, and I did keep my rights in the state/community I live in. I'm awarding this one a question mark since my rights were under assault, and there are now many more places I cannot safely travel to. That means it's not a full miss, but not a win either. ✅ No personal-time side projects went into production! Yet another year that I toyed with the idea and again talked myself out of it. I'm taking it off the list for 2026, since the urge wasn't really even there this time. ✅ Maintained relationships with friends and family. I've had regular, scheduled calls with some people close to me. I've visited people, supported them when they needed me, and asked for support when I needed it. ❓ I did a little consulting and coaching, but didn't explore many ways to make this (playful exploration like I do on here) my living. I'm giving this the question mark of dubiousity, since I don't think I got much information from the year toward the questions I wanted to answer. ✅ Kept my mental health strong! There were certainly some challenges. What I'm proud of most is that I recognized those challenges and made space for myself. That's why I stopped blogging regularly: I needed the space to get through things with intact mental health. ❓ Did some ridiculous fun projects with code, but not as much as I wanted. The main project was making it so I can type using my keyboard (you know, like a piano, not the thing with letters on it). I had aspired to do more, and I'm glad I let myself relax on this. ✅ Wrote some original music! ✅ Also recorded that original music! It's on my bandcamp page. I am really proud of how much I did on my goals. I might be unhappy with my slipping on if it were a "normal" year where the government isn't trying to strip my rights, but you know what? I'll take it. Especially since I prioritized my health and happiness. Hopes and goals for 2026 So, what would I like to get out of this new year, 2026? These aren't my predictions for what will happen, nor are they concrete goals. They're more of a reflection on what I'd like this coming year to be. This is what I'm dreaming 2026 will be like for me. Keep my rights (and maybe regain ground). A perennial goal, I'd like to be able to stay where I am and have access to, I don't know, doctors and bathrooms. We've held a lot of ground this year. Hopefully some of what was lost can be regained. I'm going to keep doing what I can, and that includes living my best life and being positive representation for all others who are under attack. Maintain relationships with friends and family. I want to keep up with my friends and family and continue having regular chats with those I care about. We're a social species, and we rely on each other for support. I'm going to keep being there for the people I care about when they need me, and keep accepting their help as well when I need them. Spin up my business. I'm going out on my own, and I'm going to be offering my software engineering services again. By the end of the year, this will hopefully be thrumming along to support me and my family. Publish weekly blog posts (sustainably). I'm back in the saddle! This is the first post of 2026, and they're going to hopefully keep coming regularly. To make it sustainable, I'm going to explore if Patreon is a viable option to offset some of the time it takes to make the blog worth reading. Record a short album. I have a track in progress, and I have four more track ideas planned. I accidentally started writing an EP, I think??? This year I would love to actually finish that and release it. Publish more poetry. Writing poetry this year was very meaningful, and it's deeply important to me. I want to get more of it published so that I can share it with people who will also be able to get deep importance from it. * * * That's it! Wow, the year was a lot. I've put a lot of myself in this post. If you've read this far, thank you so much for reading. If you've not read this far, then how're you reading this sentence anyway? 2025 had a lot in it. There were some very good things I am very grateful for. There were some very scary and bad things that I wish had never happened. All told, it's been a long few years jammed into one calendar year. I hope that 2026 will be a little calmer, with less of the bad. Maybe it can feel like just one year. Regardless, I'm going to hold as much joy in the world this year as I can. Please join me in that. Let's fill 2026 with as much joy as we can, and make the world shine in spite of everything. The surgeon really meshed me up! ↩
Keeping up with regular blog posts is a challenge. To do it, I've churned through a few different organizational systems. Sometimes I have to change them due to actual life circumstances changing; other times, due to the old one just wearing off[1]. Well, my life circumstances have changed again. I'm on medical leave right now recovering from surgery[2], and I have been writing less this year anyway. So it's that time again: new system, baby. This post isn't a how-to. It's not a prescription for your own organizational system. Rather, let it be an invitation to examine your own systems, and decide whether they're serving you or not. Out with the old So what am I replacing? Before this change, my system involved Obsidian and LunaTask: Obsidian for recording ideas LunaTask for keeping track of works in progress and things that have a due date When I get an intrusive thought about how I definitely need to try to make a transistor at home in my garage[3], I put that in my list of ideas. This list of ideas contains some ridiculously bad ideas, and some very good ideas. But the thing is, I can't tell which is which when I have the idea! The ideas have to sit and marinate, and then eventually one sticks in my head long enough that it turns itself into a blog post. With most of the already completed ideas removed, that file is over 150 lines long right now. LunaTask is used to get these ideas from my brain over the finish line. I have a project called "Writing" which is kanban style. Each blog post I earnestly intend to write gets added into it, and then I keep track of which ones are waiting, in progress, and completed. This is mostly useful for posts which require code to go along with them, or which require research[4]. Posts like this one that are all prose without research go pretty fast and never enter LunaTask. The thing is, this has been showing cracks. I've stopped recording blog post ideas all that much this year, because I've been stressed from "global events" (I'm a trans woman, my wife is an immigrant, etc.) and preparing for multiple surgeries. And tracking things in LunaTask is just not working for me at all, because it's disconnected from idea tracking but ends up being its own idea tracking, since I just really want to write all the posts. To be honest, I'm not 100% sure why LunaTask isn't working for me right now for this. It might just be that I need to perturb the system a bit to make a change. But no matter what the cause, it's time to change it. In with the new The new system is simpler than the old, because I'm removing a tool. I'm taking LunaTask out of my blog toolkit, and switching to tracking everything in Obsidian. The new system is going to be smaller: an ideas page in Obsidian a works-in-progress page a task tracker for recurring blog tasks I'm using a task tracking plugin in Obsidian for the recurring tasks, because there are some things I need to do on a regular schedule. If I want to publish on Monday, that means that the post needs to be written before the weekend and edited before Monday. I'm not using task tracking for actual posts because I know from personal experience that it ends up similar to my ideas page but with structure. I'm also not using Obsidian's Bases for this, because a raw text file is just the lowest friction way I've found to do what I need. A raw text file lets me move things around freely, add notes however and wherever I want, and do freeform brain dumps. Structure is a little tyrant that kills my motivation at certain phases, so bye bye structure, we're doing a coup here. * * * So far, so good with the new system. I'm sure I'll be onto another one eventually. The most important thing, I've found, is to remain mindful of whether or not the systems are working for you. Change them once they stop working. There's this phenomenon where self-help productivity books almost always help you when you adopt a new system. But the help doesn't last forever! It seems that changing your system helps in some way, perhaps from the increased awareness and mindfulness, or maybe from new dopamine. ↩ It was a planned gender affirming surgery. The recovery is long and challenging, but I'm recovering very well. I'm very thankful for the support I have from my friends, family, and community. ↩ How hard can it be? The hubris of a software engineer knows no bounds, except for that refactor you know you should do but that you think is just a little too hard. (And yes, making a transistor would be very hard, and no, I'm not going to do it. Probably. The thoughts are still here.) ↩ I have a partially written post on Lyme disease which I do intend to complete, but it's a topic that I really want to be careful around. And so it languishes. ↩
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TokyoDev has grown substantially over the past few years. We’ve expanded our community, dramatically increased the scope and frequency of our events, and have curated a library of articles for international developers. Despite all that, the way we run the business hasn’t changed much. I’ve continued to coordinate most of these activities myself, making the final decisions and keeping everything connected. In short, TokyoDev cannot run without my daily input. That approach worked well when TokyoDev was smaller, but it’s increasingly limiting how much we can accomplish. To help the business grow further, I wanted to find someone to take over some of my responsibilities and bring a fresh perspective. This is a significant step for me personally, as while I have worked with many contractors over the years, I have never actually hired a regular employee. Most importantly, I wanted to ensure that this person was someone I could trust to understand what TokyoDev stands for, and to make decisions in line with our philosophy. So I’m happy to announce that Scott Rothrock is joining TokyoDev full time as our Head of Operations. About Scott Scott has lived in Japan for nearly 20 years and has worked as a software engineer in multiple industries and environments, including small Japanese-owned businesses, overseas employers, and international companies based in Japan. Until the end of October 2026, he was the head of the Japan Markets team at Kraken Technologies, where he led an international team of software engineers in delivering complicated, regulated products on strict timelines for Japanese electricity and gas retailers, while also ensuring compliance with evolving organizational and global standards. He’s made a name for himself both inside and outside Japan as a kind, effective mentor who can cultivate great engineers and leaders. Scott’s previous role in TokyoDev Some of you may already know Scott in another capacity, as he has been involved with TokyoDev since 2022. He began as a community volunteer and later became our community manager, which also included responsibilities such as managing our article pipeline from submission to publishing. When I created TokyoDev’s Discord, I had no previous experience running an online community. Scott joined soon after I started and began helping other members, stepping in when people behaved inappropriately, and configuring our roles and permissions and safety features. I was impressed by his initiative and asked him to become an official moderator in January 2023. Outside of his role as a moderator, Scott has always pushed TokyoDev to grow; for example, he arranged internet events such as livestreamed AMAs and interviews. He organized TokyoDev’s first meetup as a volunteer in February 2023, which taught me that there was interest in TokyoDev events outside of the internet. By the end of 2023, I had brought him on as our part-time community manager. What I saw throughout his tenure was that Scott continued to take initiative in expanding TokyoDev. Scott was one of our first external contributors, writing about his experience living with a disability in Japan. He encouraged me to expand and refine both our editing and submission processes so that we could reach out to even more contributors and platform their perspectives. The editorial team now consists of him and Rebecca Callahan, and they’ve had a hand in every article that TokyoDev has published. In other words, since 2022, Scott has shown that he cares about TokyoDev as much as I do. He is invested in what we do and why we do it, and shares my vision for what TokyoDev can become. What changes now Scott’s experiences as an engineer, a mentor, and a leader make me confident that, as our Head of Operations, he will continue to help TokyoDev mature. A big part of what has made TokyoDev successful is that I see the software developers who use our site as my peers and genuinely want to help them. Scott shares that perspective, and will join me in ensuring that TokyoDev remains true to its principles while we grow. So what changes in the short term? Nothing dramatic. I will teach Scott about managing TokyoDev as a business, and he will document our processes and products as a part of that learning. He will also look for areas of improvement while ensuring that we remain compliant with regulations and labor law. Over time, I will hand over some other responsibilities. I will continue to run TokyoDev, but TokyoDev will become less dependent on me for its day-to-day operations. Long term, I’m excited about what this will enable us to do. TokyoDev has always been about helping international software developers build successful careers in Japan, and bringing Scott on full time puts us in a much better position to continue doing that. We look forward to writing the next chapter of TokyoDev together.
Kidz Fun Art is a drawing, colouring and animation app for kids that I’ve been building since 2021. It runs in the browser also as a simple wrapper app on iOS, iPadOS and Windows. It wasn’t getting a great click through rate on Google, even for people who directly searched for it. So, for two days I took a hard look at how fast it loads and how search engines see it. It wasn’t flattering. This post covers what I found, what I changed and what the graphs say now. Short version: on a simulated slow phone, the homepage’s Largest Contentful Paint got about 2.6× faster (15.9 s to 6.1 s) and its first load is about 82% smaller (4.2 MB to 0.75 MB). I also fixed a set of SEO mistakes that are, frankly, embarrassing to write down. I’ll write them down anyway. Part 1: Google had no idea what the site was for I started by reading 16 months of Google Search Console data. 9,380 clicks in total. About 9,200 came from people who had typed “kidz fun art” or a close spelling. People searching for what the app actually does (“coloring app for kids”, “ai art for kids”, “make a comic book”) sent the site 164 clicks. In 16 months. Total. When there was a relevant page, Google ranked it well. The site was #1 for things like “drawing app for kids ipad” and a German query that means “paint by numbers app without ads”. There just weren’t many relevant pages. Then I looked at the code, and the cause was obvious. The homepage <title> was “Kidz Fun Art” in all 12 languages. That’s a fine name, and a terrible title. It tells a search engine nothing. The homepage’s first <h1> was the pricing table’s “Choose your experience”. I was, in effect, telling Google that the most important thing on my homepage was the checkout. Every blog post had the same meta description: a generic line about “news, updates, tips”. Each post’s front matter already had a perfectly good excerpt field that nobody read. Blog posts had two <h1>s: the site header and the post title. There was no structured data at all. The sitemap that redirected every single URL This one stings. The sitemap is the one file whose whole job is to say “here are my URLs, please index them”. Mine listed 17 URLs, and every one of them redirected. The sitemap build used an environment variable that resolved to kidzfun.art. The site lives on www.kidzfun.art, so every URL got a 308. Only the English blog posts were listed. The other 11 languages appeared only as hreflang alternates, which pointed at redirecting URLs too. There were no <link rel="canonical"> tags on any page and no hreflang in the page <head>. Google was left to guess which URL was the real one, and it guessed wrong a lot. What I changed: The sitemap is now built on https://www.kidzfun.art, with 204 URLs: every home page, blog index, blog post, About page and gallery page, in all 12 languages. Each one lists all of its language alternates plus an x-default. A shared SeoLinks component adds an absolute canonical (www, no query string) and the full hreflang set to every public page. The ?v= cache-busting URLs that had been showing up as duplicates now canonicalise to the clean URL. /xx/blog/yy/... URLs, which returned a 500 in production (oops), now 308 to /blog/yy/.... Login, account, debug, export and embed pages send X-Robots-Tag: noindex, follow from next.config.js, so they stop using up crawl budget. robots.txt now mentions the sitemap. Novel idea. Why Google skipped half the site Search Console’s Pages report had 93 of 174 known pages not indexed. Every reason on that list traces back to the mistakes above: “Page with redirect” (22): that sitemap, plus internal links to the non-www host. “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” (18): I hadn’t selected any canonicals. Fair cop. “Crawled, currently not indexed” (39): mostly translated posts that Google reached through redirecting URLs, plus thin pages like /login. “Discovered, currently not indexed” (12): Google found these and decided they weren’t worth a visit. With no sitemap entry and no hreflang, I hadn’t given it a reason to. On-page fixes Titles and descriptions: Each blog post got its own seoTitle and description, in all 12 languages. The meta description now comes from the post’s excerpt, which is what that field was for all along. The About pages take their title and description from their own localized Markdown. They had been sharing an English title and a generic description. One <h1> per page: A # heading inside a post’s Markdown now renders as an <h2>, so the post title is the only <h1>. The About page opts back in with a keepH1 prop. Its Markdown heading is the page title. This fix arrived in two parts. The first part left the About page with zero <h1>s. I noticed, eventually. Structured data and social tags: JSON-LD for the home page (the app), blog posts (articles) and the embedded videos. Open Graph and X/Twitter tags on every public page, so shared links get a proper card. A real 404 for deleted gallery images: The AI gallery shows a friendly “AI Artwork Not Found” page when an image has been deleted. It used to return 200 OK, which Google calls a “soft 404” and dislikes. It now returns a 404 with noindex, and a 503 if the Firestore lookup itself fails, so a database hiccup tells crawlers “come back later” rather than “this is gone”. Part 2: Making the homepage fast The homepage is the app. It works offline, so every dialog (save, stickers, colouring pages, “get an adult”, “no wifi”) is server-rendered into the HTML up front. That’s a deliberate trade-off, and I kept it because I want new users to be able to immediately be able to start drawing as soon as they launch the app. What I hadn’t thought about was what it meant for the network. What the homepage downloaded before the app could start I measured the live site with a Lighthouse-style mobile profile: slow 4G (1.6 Mbps, 150 ms latency), 4× CPU slowdown, empty cache. First load: 4.5 MB over 198 requests. The homepage HTML alone was 358 KB, with about 77 <img> tags in hidden dialogs. The browser dutifully fetched every one of those images. The script that starts the app (main.min.js, 191 KB) sat at the very end of the document, so the browser found it last and gave it whatever bandwidth was left. The app script finished arriving at about 14 seconds. The CPU was not the problem. Every long task was under 300 ms. This was purely about bandwidth and request order. I had built a very polite queue and put my own app at the back of it. Watch the queue The waterfall is a simplified illustration. The milestone times (first paint, LCP, load) are measured: slow 4G + 4× CPU, local production build, median of 3 runs. My Largest Contentful Paint was the “Contact support” link The canvas doesn’t count toward LCP, and the toolbar buttons are small. So on a slow load the largest thing painted was… the loading dialog. The loading dialog fades in its “Taking a while? Contact support” text after 5 to 7.5 seconds. On a slow connection, that text became the page’s LCP element, at 15.9 s. I was measuring my page speed by how long it took to suggest the user complain about my page speed. There’s a lesson in there somewhere. The fix wasn’t to change the dialog. It was to make the app start sooner, so it paints before that text ever appears. What I changed Preload the app script. I added <link rel="preload" as="script"> in <head> for main.min.js and errorHandler.min.js. The <script> tags stay where they were, so execution order doesn’t change. The browser just starts fetching them before any image. This one line did more than anything else on this list. It’s a little humbling. Turn the three dialog GIFs into MP4s. Three animated GIFs: an arrow pushing pictures into a tablet (927 KB), a dancing rainbow pencil (650 KB) and a paper plane (305 KB). That’s 1.9 MB of decoration in dialogs most visitors never open on their first visit. I re-encoded them with ffmpeg: H.264 High profile, -preset veryslow -crf 20, yuv420p, +faststart, constant frame rate taken from each GIF’s frame delay. The commands are committed as scripts/gif-to-mp4.sh. The result is 130 KB in total, with SSIM between 0.988 and 0.993 against the originals. The pencil needed tpad=stop_mode=clone:stop_duration=0.2, because ffmpeg’s GIF reader drops the final 250 ms hold and the dance lost its big finish. The new <video autoplay loop muted playsinline> tags render at exactly the same size and class as the old <img> tags. Alt text moved to aria-label. Locked colouring thumbnails were full-size PNGs. In the colouring page picker, locked pages used the full-size colouring PNG as their background image, inlined into the HTML. That came to about 1.3 MB on every first visit, to draw thumbnails in a dialog that was closed. They now use the small image, set when the picker opens, like the unlocked ones always did. Sticker thumbnails wait their turn. I tried loading="lazy" first. It didn’t help: Chrome fetched the images before the stylesheet that hides the dialogs had arrived, so as far as it knew they were visible. Sticker thumbnails and the media library’s YouTube thumbnail now use data-deferred-src. They load 3 seconds after the load event, or as soon as their dialog opens, whichever comes first. The service worker preload starts after load. The offline preload queue (about 2 MB of colouring pages and stickers) used to start while the page was still loading and compete with it. Now it starts after the load event. Same files, same offline result, no fighting for bandwidth. Analytics is async. Nothing waited for it, so nothing needed to block on it. Cache headers. /images/*: max-age=86400, stale-while-revalidate=604800. It had been max-age=0, so every image was re-checked on every visit. Versioned /js, /css and /addToHomescreen files are immutable for a year in production. Offline still has to work Offline support is a core feature, so “just don’t download it” was never an option. Some of the changes above put it at risk, and a couple of things turned up along the way: Safari plays video from byte ranges. Safari requests video with Range: bytes=.... Answer that with a full cached response and the video won’t play. The service worker now answers Range requests from its cache with a proper 206 Partial Content slice (lib/util/rangeResponse.ts, with unit tests). First-visit gap: on a first visit the service worker isn’t controlling the page yet, so dialog images only reached the offline cache on the second online visit. The page’s own dialog images and videos now go to the front of the offline preload queue on the first visit. I nearly downloaded my whole site, 12 times over. The service worker cached every <link href> it found in the page. The new SEO work had just added canonical and hreflang <link>s pointing at all 12 localized homepages. So every new visitor would have downloaded about 12 extra homepages, in languages they don’t speak, “for offline use”. I caught it before production. The service worker now skips rel=canonical and rel=alternate. Safari stopped the service worker mid-download. The old preload queue ran on timers after the request had been answered. Safari considers an idle service worker fair game, so it stopped it after the first few images. The page now sends images in batches of 10, and the service worker caches each batch before it replies. A page lock-up I’d never noticed. resizeDialog added a new “image loaded” listener every time the window resized. With lots of images loading at once, the listeners multiplied until the page locked up. It now attaches one listener per image, which, in hindsight, is how many it needed. Part 3: The blog Blog index cards used the full 1920 px screenshots as covers, up to 500 KB each, in a box about 200 px wide. Each card was a little billboard, shrunk down by the browser on every visit. Covers now go through next/image with sizes that match the actual card widths, so the browser gets a resized WebP. The first few cards get priority. The rest load lazily. The first sizes hint was too small at some widths and made covers blurry. It now matches the real card widths, up to about 630 px between 769 px and 1028 px wide. Post pages: The cover image gets fetchpriority="high", and images further down the post load lazily. Five images were recompressed in place, keeping the same filenames and dimensions. The PNGs came out about 4× smaller and the JPEGs about 40% smaller. I deleted a 1.1 MB cover.png that nothing referenced. All 12 translations of that post used cover.jpg. The PNG had just been sitting in public/ taking up space. Results on the slow 4G profile: /blog LCP went from 13.3 s to 1.8 s. A typical post went from 3.9 s to 1.7 s. The gallery didn’t get faster, on purpose. It got a 5-minute edge cache and a cached Firestore image count, which fixed its slow server responses. I decided not to change its 20 full-size PNG thumbnails, so its lab LCP barely moved (8.4 s to 8.6 s). That’s a choice, and the chart owns it. Part 4: Lighthouse homework After the speed work went live I ran Lighthouse on the production homepage (mobile) and cleaned up what it flagged. Performance stayed in the low 70s, so I have some more work to do, but it’s moved nicely in the right direction. Part 5: Telling the search engines Fixing the site is half the job. The other half is getting crawlers to come back and notice. Google Search Console: Resubmitted the www sitemap. Clicked “Validate fix” on “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” and on the redirect errors. Requested indexing for the main language homepages and the top blog posts. The quota is about 10 a day, so it’ll take a few days. Wrote down a baseline from the Performance report, so in 4 to 8 weeks I can tell whether any of this worked. Bing Webmaster Tools: Submitted all 204 sitemap URLs through URL Submission. The daily quota is 10,000, so no trickle-feeding needed. Bing’s index also feeds DuckDuckGo and several AI search tools, so it’s cheap extra reach. Most of Bing’s “SEO recommendations” pointed at old ?v= URLs and old titles. They’ll clear as Bing recrawls. What I’m not watching: the Lighthouse score. Google ranks on real-user Chrome data (the Chrome UX Report): a rolling 28-day window, judged at the 75th percentile. So the honest answer to “did it work?” is “ask me in a month”. How I kept from breaking things The app has hundreds of unit and integration tests, all of which still pass (even though they do take over 30 minutes to run). I also manually regression tested all the riskiest changes. Hopefully I don’t make things worse before they get better… Lessons, mostly at my own expense Read your own sitemap. Actually open it and click a URL. Mine had been quietly redirecting for who knows how long. <link rel="preload"> for the script that boots your app is the cheapest big win there is. Browsers fetch resources in the order they find them. If your app script is at the bottom of a 358 KB document full of images, it really is last in line. Check what your LCP element actually is before you try to make it faster. Mine was a “Contact support” link. GIF is an image format from 1987 that I was using as a video format. A real video codec beats it by an order of magnitude at the same quality. try/catch doesn’t catch promise rejections. I knew that. My code didn’t. Every <link> you add to <head> is something your service worker might decide to download. Speed scores are for diagnosis. Rankings come from real users. Fix what the lab finds, then wait for the field data. Epilogue You’re still here? Wow. Cool. After all this, I’m hoping that users notice nothing other than quicker app start times. I’m looking forward to keeping an eye on traffic and retention in the coming weeks. Wish me luck!
Five months ago, we rebuilt our warehouse on DuckDB instead of ClickHouse. We did it because a shared ClickHouse cluster couldn't handle hours-long…
It's time for a dev blogger's favorite topic: blogging about my new blogging setup. After migrating my blog from Hexo to Eleventy, building a photography website and creating a personal one-pager, it was time to find a new digital home for all my projects. If you notice any issue after the migration, please let me know. I redirect the RSS feed to the new domain, but you might want to update the feed URL in your reader. Motivation I've been maintaining three different websites under two different names: a mostly developer-oriented blog, a photography portfolio and a one-pager gluing everything together. When I started blogging about my sabbatical journey, I was thinking about making yet another page to create a clear separation. I've decided to do the opposite and merge all my websites into one instead. As I further reduce my dependency on social media and third-party services, it has become even more important to have my own space and practice POSSE. Every decision I've made was driven by two main goals: simplicity and personality. Setup I've stopped chasing the latest and greatest. I want to keep the setup as clean as possible, which means pulling fewer dependencies. Every package adds complexity and maintainability costs, so I've only added what was necessary — no more Gulp, Sass or Tailwind. Instead of taking one of my existing websites as a starting point, I created this project from scratch. I reused some of my previous code, but I didn't want to take over any technical debt (especially with the advancements in CSS). The foundation of this website hasn't changed: Eleventy (Build Awesome). It covers the fundamentals of a static site and offers a great level of customization. I've made my project more and less dependent on Eleventy at the same time: I replaced Gulp as my build pipeline with pure Eleventy processing. I replaced most shortcodes with Markdown alternatives (and markdown-it plugins), which are better supported by editors like Obsidian. I've also replaced the Nunjucks template engine with Liquid, which comes with a few trade-offs. The main reason was to avoid creating a new collection for every set of posts I render. With Liquid, you can apply array functions like filtering or sorting in the template itself: {% assign drafts = collections.all | where: "data.isDraft" | reverse %} {% for draft in drafts %} … {% endfor %} Another advantage is having date formatting included, so I don't need another library or custom code. You can even set a default date format, so you don't have to provide it each time. What I don't like is the verbosity of the template language, although I've gotten used to it by now. Nunjucks: {{ "/tags/" + tag + "/" }} {{ modified or created or date }} {% set perspectives = ["dev", "photography", "life"] %} Liquid: {{ "/tags/" | append: tag | append: "/" }} {{ modified | default: created | default: date }} {% assign perspectives = "dev, photography, life" | split: ", " %} After migrating my existing content, I've noticed the build taking way too long, both in the dev server and the production build. I've found out that the Eleventy template cache is turned off for Liquid by default. This was useful during development, but when updating actual content, it caused every template and partial to be constantly recalculated. After turning the cache on, this issue was resolved: eleventyConfig.setLiquidOptions({ cache: true }); Check the colophon for the full tech stack overview. Perspectives The main challenge was finding a way to separate and present my main personas. The Venn diagram intersection of people interested in software development, photography and my personal life is probably small. I could use tags, but they don't offer the level of personalization I was looking for. Most personal blogs separate the content by post type (blog post, note, photo), but this doesn't fit my use case. Instead, I've decided to structure my website around three perspectives, a term I have borrowed from the Eclipse IDE. Each perspective comes with its own avatar, tagline and bio. If someone is interested in everything I share (hi Mom!), they can still view all my posts. Design Since building my photography website, I've made many changes, but I never got around to share an update. The biggest change was the design, which I have used as a blueprint for the new website. I've decided to mimic a social timeline/feed, which most people are familiar with. At the same time, it should be clear that it's a personal website and not yet another walled garden. Typography is an important part of every design. The first step is to choose between a system font stack and a custom font, which comes with the usual performance vs. personality trade-offs. I've decided to go with a uniform look across all devices. I've settled on Source Sans 3 for copy text and Hack for code. Another big change was introducing a sidebar. I always felt like the empty horizontal space was "wasted" on a desktop device, but getting the sidebar UX right is challenging. I'm happy with the result, especially with the last two panels adding a personal touch to the design. Images I've made several changes to the handling of image files. To make them compatible with Markdown editors, I had to replace my custom picture shortcode. The official Eleventy image plugin is a popular choice, but it violates my simplicity goal and doesn't support everything I needed. I've decided to go with a plain Markdown image markup and a single image file (no format fallback or 2x version for retina displays). Additionally, I wrote a markdown-it plugin to turn the optional title parameter into a caption. As for the file format, both WebP and AVIF have excellent browser support. For each image, I select the format based on the quality and file size. For my photos, I'm using WebP for the timeline thumbnails and JPG for the full-size version. Theme picker There have been some recent discussions about dark mode toggles, and I considered going for a light/dark solution based on the user's OS preference. Driven by the personality goal, I knew I had to add at least one more theme, so a proper theme picker was necessary. Similar to navigation, people like to hide the theme selection on mobile devices behind a burger menu or a dropdown. I prefer the solution by Sarah L. Fossheim, where all available themes are displayed above the page footer. A friend was scrolling through my new website, and their first question was "Why is the theme picker in the footer?". This tells me the solution was a good idea — I don't think he would have noticed a typical theme button in the header. The implementation follows standard practices: Use the light or dark theme as default based on the user's OS or browser preference. Store a selected theme in the local storage and use it as the single source of truth. Prevent a flash of inaccurate color theme. Make the theme play nicely with bfcache. I might have slightly gone overboard with my third theme, but the nostalgia kept me adding more and more features. Enjoy going back to the 90s: Feeds As browser vendors decided to remove XSLT support, I didn't bother to style my feed. Instead, I've created a new web feeds page, listing all available feeds and a short explanation. I provide one feed for every perspective and one with all my posts combined. I once offered tag-based RSS feeds. This was useful for my sabbatical, but even there I had only a single subscriber. Now, all tag feeds redirect to their main perspective feed. I've also dropped the JSON feed, despite having at least 16 subscribers. Given that every web feed reader supports Atom feeds, I don't see the value of providing a JSON alternative. A JSON feed doesn't add much complexity, but handling different media types (post, photo) and properly escaping the content is one more thing to implement and maintain. Quality assurance I've put a lot of effort into my new digital home, and I want to make sure it stays in good shape. I've included several tools, most running automatically as part of the CI pipeline: eleventyDataSchema — lint Eleventy data values like titles or dates markdownlint — format/lint Markdown files Vale — lint content (grammar, writing style, formatting) Lychee — find broken links (internal and external) Evaluatory — check accessibility and validate HTML Oxlint — lint JavaScript files Eleventy linters are another option to analyze a template's output, but I haven't found a use case for it yet. Not everything can be automated, so I also did the following manually: Test with Chrome, Firefox and Safari Test with Polypane Test with Google Lighthouse Test with a screen reader Test with JavaScript disabled Test with CSS disabled Test at 200% zoom Test with a bigger browser font size Test with custom fonts disabled Test with delayed assets Performance It's difficult to compare the performance of two separate websites with that of a combined one. Some parts got worse, e.g. bigger font files and more CSS. At the same time, I've noticed that gzip compression was turned off for anything but HTML for a few years now (I must have missed it when upgrading nginx) 🙈. One improvement was to implement on-demand assets. For example, the lite-youtube-embed CSS and JavaScript is only loaded if a <lite-youtube> element is present on the page. As before, JavaScript is fully optional (except for interactive demos in individual posts). I've been using a mix of <noscript> and CSS to hide elements that require JS (like the theme picker). I don't like the user experience of pagination, so I avoided it for years. But now that I have almost 300 posts, I've decided to finally add it. I display 30 posts per page, with images further down still being lazy-loaded for better performance. I haven't applied pagination to tag pages, as that's more complex with Eleventy. Bits and pieces Here are some other noteworthy changes: I've removed post-specific social share images and use a single WebP Open Graph image instead. I've dropped JSON-LD. Open Graph and microformats are sufficient. "Naming is hard" is a common expression in software development, but it also applies to photograph titles. I've decided to use a counter as the title, e.g. #0100. Sometimes I do come up with a title that I love, like the Castle in the Sky, so I might mention it in the description. On a photo page, you can now open the previous/next photo using the left/right arrow keys (in addition to the existing navigation buttons). It's now possible to filter photos by date, gear, or location. Check the explore page for an overview. I've learned about and used some experimental CSS features (with progressive enhancement), like scroll-triggered animations or squircle corners. I've added an AI statement on my LLM usage. I finally have a proper about page. Cool URIs don't change, but it's inevitable when moving to a new domain. All my previous URLs are redirected, except for some assets that are no longer used. I will keep the old domain, so the redirects will continue to work for a foreseeable future. I've kept my previous Easter egg and added a few more. Have a happy hunt! 🕵️♂️ Inspiration I visited hundreds of personal websites looking for inspiration. Here are a few that I kept coming back to: Emma Goto. I love Emma's approach to presenting the variety of her interests, even though I went a different route. Brennan Kenneth Brown. This website has so much to offer. It's a great example of what the open web looks like. Rex Barrett. The sentence "Collecting hobbies is my hobby." hit home — so much that I had to steal borrow it for my short life bio. Conclusion This project was mostly about merging the content of two websites into one. I knew this would take a considerable amount of time, but I still greatly underestimated the effort. In the end, it was all about the journey, not the destination. I loved fine-tuning the design and tweaking little details that probably no one will ever notice. I still have many more ideas left in my backlog. How do you like my new digital home? If you have an opinion, let me know! Reply via email
