The journey began one night when I was playing with my cats and videoing them. My wife helpfully chimed: “Why not make an Instagram account for them? You’re always videoing them and posting about them on your personal account anyway!”

By nature I dislike content that’s “curated” or “fake” as I would call it. I brushed it aside and didn’t think about it for awhile.

But the damage was done. An idea was seeded. A revolution was underway.

A week or two later while looking into cat Instagram accounts, I came to a surprising (or maybe unsurprising) conclusion: My cats were cuter than 90% of cats out there 💀

At that time, I was a few days away from Japan and unwilling to start something just before I went for a two week holiday. So the idea had two weeks to infiltrate my mind and fester in ways I never thought possible.

When I got back from Japan, I downloaded CapCut, InShot, VN, and all the other popular video editing tools, and tried them out on random clips. Initial results were cringey but I eventually found a sweet spot between cringey and “over-curated” that I kind of liked.

Spent 3-4 full days making videos of my Japan trip, and ended up becoming comfortable enough with CapCut’s controls and interface that I could create 30s videos in less than 30 minutes. To put things in perspective, my first <20s video took me 3-4 hours because I didn’t know where everything was and what I could even do in video editing software.

And came the day. I wasn’t ready, definitely not. I only had one video when I made their Instagram and TikTok account (it’s here and here respectively, a follow + likes/engagement would be super highly appreciated).

My brain was screaming at me: “TF you doing you fool? You were supposed to have a pipeline and methodology first!”

But knowing me and my tendency to prepare indefinitely until something never gets done, perhaps it was for the best. Over the next few days, I found out that truly, for me at least, sometimes just taking the plunge is what I need. After all the fuss about the first video, the next few videos just flowed. I now have a pipeline of about ten unposted videos from a daily morning routine of commenting on other cat accounts + shooting my cats’ interactions before they take their nap for the afternoon + creating some casual videos from CapCut templates + working on the longer manual videos

In anyways, it’s been almost a week and I’ve now got a grand total of 15 followers on Instagram and 13 on TikTok. After a week, I’m only starting to observe organic followers (instead of friends) trickle in, and the challenge of getting to >1k followers is starting to manifest itself to me.

I definitely wasn’t expecting instant overnight success, and based on my research, some people see months without a single viral post. The game is to keep posting until some day, some correct person shares/reposts/comments, and the algorithm decides to blow the post up.

Reminds me of the concept that “luck” is a skill despite it’s RNG nature. It’s all about getting out there and staying out there until you “get lucky”.

Posting daily on the cats has also made my mind think thoughts.

I love framing concepts into models that I can operate based on, my mind naturally does that to almost every concept I come across. For social media at least, here is my current mental model based on a week of observing it from a “how can I optimise this” lens.

The metrics of success/failure to me:

1. Followers — It’s a vanity metric, but it’s a number that brands are familiar with and can use to justify brand collaborations/ambassador partnerships which is my goal

2. Likes — Someone enjoyed the content and felt enough to hit the like button on it. It’s the minimal form of engagement and correlating it with my number of followers provides a sign that the quality of my content is going in the right direction.

3. Shares — I want to hold off paid promotions for as long as I possibly can. This means that the number of shares matters to me because how else would I get known?

4. Comments — Engagement via comments is the true growth metric IMO. Unlike a simple like, a comment means someone, possibly a few thousand miles away, was emotionally affected enough to open the comment box, type something into it, and hit send. While “likes” indicate content quality, comments to me indicate “relationship”. Trust — which partnerships are built on — isn’t established from the quality of content, but from relationships and reputation of an account.

The types of content available to me:

1. Video content — AKA reels in Instagram, or just videos in TikTok. This is the bread and butter type of content which seems like the minimal type of medium to get attention these days. Videos are easy to consume compared to photos and photosets. It’s about meeting people where they are, and most people scroll at night after all their brain power has been used up

2. Photo content — Static imagery. Ever since the more visual social media platforms shifted focus to videos, the purpose that photos serve have become one of curated snapshots in time. Paired with a sincere text post, photosets serve as a second kind of medium which serve as a “showcase” kind of medium as compared to the storytelling/attention-capturing nature of videos.

3. Comments — Not sure how many people consider comments a form of medium but I do since it’s technically something you can post. Comments establish — for lack of a less serious term — “thought leadership” and also boosts account visibility since everyone else who opens the comments will see your account. This works especially well with newer posts where you’re in the first few commenters. Posting something relevant/catchy gets likes. And when other accounts engage with yours, I believe the algorithm recognises it (I got 5 new followers the day after a comment I wrote received 11 likes

   

Based on the metrics I’ve set for myself, I’m also mentally scoring each of my videos based on:

1. Enjoyability — Affects likes. This is generally a gauge of content quality, how pleasing is it to the eye, how quickly can the content trigger emotions in a viewer, how long can the content keep the viewer watching.

2. Shareability — Affects shares. Just because something is enjoyable doesn’t mean it’s shareable. Shareable content to me are posts that go along the lines of “This is your sign to…” or “Things you didn’t know about…” or “Send this to someone who…” or posts with actually useful information in them like “Cat ownership framework in Singapore” or “How our cats took their neutering”

3. Call-to-action — Mainly whatever I want a viewer to do. For me right now, this is growing my follower count which means this will be things that subtly hint at following whether by a direct call or by emotional blackmail which cats tend to be good for 💀

4. Commentability — Affects comments. These types of posts have an underlying “what do you think?” question or a slightly controversial take on something

Why so serious and provide a score though?

To me, posts need to be rotated based on their score in each of those aspects. Too many call-to-actions just makes an account feel desperate for growth, too much enjoyable content without call-to-actions or people sharing it makes for lots of likes (relative to the follower count) without conversion into engagement or vanity metrics that can be used to grow the account. You get the idea.

Well, it’s only been a week so what do I know?

Will post again when new thoughts emerge on this content creation journey that I never expected to embark on :D

If you’d like to support (please also help to like posts when you see them/comment on them :DDD), here’s their accounts:

Instagram: https://instagram.com/yuji.kouji

Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@yuji.kouji

“It takes a village to raise a child,” is a proverb I’ve been fascinated by for some time now.

It’s a simple one-liner, but the more I dwell on it (admittedly four years without any action now…), the more invested I become in how profound it can be and how needed it might be in today’s world where everyone is connected to each other and yet nobody is.

Disclaimer: Wall of text follows. Mostly I’m writing this to process my motivations for doing this, and also so that I can come back to this if I ever get lost in a few years after forgetting the experience of being me in early 2026. Also, this is labelled Part I, but a part II is not guaranteed, depending on whether I actually discover/try an acceptable (to me) implementation.

Origins: Exhibit A — Crypto

The idea of implementing the proverb first came to me during my crypto degenerate days. In those days, I got involved in online communities of crypto projects and it opened my perspectives around how genuine relationships can be built over the internet.

To be fair, all of us were united by a goal of supporting our projects in the hopes that we’d gain “intergenerational wealth” or some finance bro shit like that; but that doesn’t discount that real friendships were built through the process.

Together we profited when the price of our projects’ coins/tokens pumped, together we lost when the price dumped. There was solidarity in that, away from wives, away from children, away from coworkers, our identities masked by a username or wallet adress.

Somehow we ended up genuinely caring about each others’ bags even when we were in different projects, different life stages, and different socio-economic backgrounds.

If one of us knew about a project that was going to be hot (and I reminisce: probably nothin’ in crypto degen terms), we’d let others in our circles know. If one of us had insider information about a massive liquidation happening soon resulting in a dump, everyone in the group would know.

The 2022-2023 market crash took out most communities including the one I was involved in, yes, but checking Discord just today, those who stayed have built authentic and genuine relationships within their communities.

Origins: Exhibit B - Climbing

The next time this idea came to me was when I started climbing some time in between 2023-2024.

It’s difficult to make friends as an adult. Ask anyone in their thirties and forties. Unlike in our twenties, generally our thirties and onwards sees us through friends getting married to the love of their lives, friends birthing their next loves of their lives (kids), friends having adult curfews because of their new families, friends living with and supporting elderly parents, even friends going through divorces or financial setbacks.

Life gets real. The time to hang out, get bored, do stupid things — and in the process building authentic, genuine relationships — is no longer the luxury it once was in our teens and early twenties. But we never could have recognised it then could we?

Bouldering became a steady constant in my life by 2024. Asides from when my aging body gives up on me, I was there week after week. Twice, sometimes three times.

Bouldering gyms gradually became my third place, where I’d see familiar faces, say hello, say see you again; I’d check in with the random guy who’s about to enlist to National Service, exchange dad-jokes with the gym staff who’s in-between jobs, get tutored by a university-going dude on some move, exchange complaints about aches and how lovely it’d be to jump around like those kids with someone in their fifties.

Once again, I felt the effects of a community.

In the context of gym climbing Singapore, it’s common for us to have Instagram accounts where we’d post videos of our climbs. Yes, there are those who post for the fame and glory, but for the majority of us, it feels more like a bid to connect and be connected with. We’d help each other out with routes we were having problems with, suggest interesting ways to make a route work, and even make fun of each other.

Interestingly, the community in this case is not what keeps me climbing, I climb to build strength now so that I may have an easier time later in my life.

But community is what I got.

Through the 5 minutes of rest between attempts, sitting idly looking at the wall together wondering if a send was going to happen that day, relationships formed. Through the cheering when someone struggles hard and manages to send something, relationships formed.

As it was like in crypto communities when we profited/lost, climbers are (generally) genuinely happy for each other when a send is done, and climbers genuinely feel for each other when we have to walk away from an unsent problem we’ve been working on for weeks because the routes were getting reset/an injury set in while trying hard.

Why it matters to me

Through both crypto and climbing, I think I’ve made more genuine friends in my adult life than I ever have across the seven years that I spent networking at meetups.

I liked how I felt connected to others through these experiences.

To an average person with an average upbringing, that might seem duh, but that’s quite a bit for me to say considering my own personal intergenerational trauma. The environment I grew up in prides independence and not needing/trusting anyone. I grew up striving for strength because I didn’t want to need anyone (as an example, Centaur (a tank) was my choice in Dota, because I didn’t want anyone to “save” me), I grew up pushing people away because someday they’d betray me, and I was secretly delighted when people proved me right because I tested them. Sick but true. But those days are long gone.

Thanks to many serendipitously fortunate wholesome experiences in my adult life, I’ve managed to walk away from my past narratives and I’m now someone that actually loves connecting with people. I’m admittedly lacking in the social skills which others have probably honed over twenty years of connecting with people, and I also have issues with responding to people on time, but I’m glad that I’ve at least found this part of myself that is truly me and not based on intergenerational narratives.

But wait, how do I have the confidence to say that this is truly me?

As a kid, my parents often told me of stories where’d I’d randomly walk up to strangers and start conversations, I was very very social. Something changed along the way and as I grew to become no longer a kid, expectations grew, and principles were increasingly imprinted upon me by the same people that once commented how cute/friendly I was.

These narratives might have worked for them and their time, but it clearly wasn’t for me in this generation.

I faced mild anxiety in my mid/late-twenties with occasionally crippling panic attacks. No one knew about this back then. No one could. Looking back, it was clearly because I felt very alone. I had a team, but I wasn’t part of the team; I had colleagues, but I did my absolute best not to bother them. While it meant that I learnt a lot and achieved a decent amount of corporate success, it also meant that once the work day was over, even when afterwork drinks were over, I didn’t feel like I knew any of them and I couldn't feel like I could trust. And it gnawed away at my soul.

What brought me out of my anxiety, turned out to be very cliched: love.

Not referring to the romantic kind although that is part of it; but it was the ability and aptitude to both love and be loved by people in general and in different ways that wiped out most of my anxiety.

It began from a course I took around 2019 where I experienced the domain of human systems work and began recognising my own narratives. It started from an awareness of my own narratives, and through years of (admittedly not very intentional — it could’ve been faster lol) practice and occasionally stepping out of my comfort zone, I managed to resolve my anxiety problems without any medication, but with love, both being willing to give and receive it.

With my newfound aptitude of actually liking people, I found that I wanted to find my tribe in adulthood.

Finding/addressing the problem

Making more friends and deepening existing relationships across the past few years, has exposed me to something I’m observing with people around my age and even slightly younger.

Many want to form genuine connections with others, but asides from dating contexts, there’s very few platforms for relationship forming in Singapore. Those who tried going for these events found them cringey/had weirdos/weren’t aligned with their personalities.

I’ve attended some myself and I lean towards agreement. But why? Why did I find it cringey? How was I assessing people as weirdos that I wouldn’t want anything to do with?

This are my authentic — but processed — thoughts around a meetup I attended recently, one that I had very high hopes for, Fireplace, (you can check them out at @thisisfireplace on Instagram) given they promised weird people:

• The attendees were at a different stage of life than me. What they found interesting/worth applauding were things I’ve already experienced and left behind in 2015 when I was all about the startup hustle culture. I felt disgusted because I knew how it turned out for me, how the people I knew then turned out, how this culture was unsustainable in the long run.

• The attendees were indeed weird, but weird in a different way than me. I never liked the idea of fitting in, if I personally didn’t find something worth applauding, I’d sit there stoically, rudely to some. I’d never post a single company propaganda. If I didn’t want to talk to someone, they would know. Unlike the weird I expected, I found a weird that was still conformist, naive (self-reminder: it’s called different stage of life), and to me, shallow. And it’s here that I correct myself: maybe I wasn’t looking for weird, I was looking for punk. People who hate the system but still try to succeed in-spite by focusing on themselves instead of competing within the system. I wanted something outside the system.

• The ideas were basic and not well founded in all stages of a product’s development. Which in retrospect, is expected given the demographics. There I was, someone with experience in building products and seeing startups grow up, yet I was there being a snob refusing to point out what could be improved, what else needed to be done. Am I at fault? In retrospect, yes, but in my defence, I didn’t feel safe to do so. This safety; I identified as something I secretly wanted the event organisers to facilitate, but which didn’t happen. I was in a room full of strangers, yes people said hi, nodded, but that was about it. I didn’t have any emotional/social support, and for who I am, that was a dealbreaker.

I processed these as a fundamental issue across most socialisation platforms (for me at least): there was a lack of understanding about human systems work on the part of the organisers and it showed in their implementation. Psychological safety (yes, that very overused term of the 2020s) has to be nurtured, even more so in groups of potential strangers, in order to bring out the best of what a group of people have amongst them.

Not everyone is lucky enough to be exposed to human systems work, courses/workshops generally start at $4-5k and can go up to $20-30k. And those that have, are generally more content with life and the relationships they have by nature of the skills and awarenesses they’ve gained through these programmes.

And this is where I think I can contribute. I’m someone who has experienced training in human systems work and can essentially debug social environments, and I want to help others who are looking for safe places to make genuine connections, find it.

Through interactions with a few valued friends who are also in the know, I’ve learnt that this is basically known as: community-building.

I want to build a community.

Beginnings of an idea that works for me

Within the past week of being unemployed and getting bored and just sharing my day-to-day/random thoughts on both Instagram and Substack, I’ve had a few chats with friends.

Different friends came with different angles. The person in the chat above agreed with me that finding an appropriate community of builders was difficult. They’re an ex-colleague of mine who’s a solo founder and who just got funding; which means they’re now facing the immense uphill task of building out a company by themselves under investor pressure.

While to me they’re doing extremely well on the surface, we also got into the darker aspects of building stuff like the inevitable sporadiac feelings of burnout that happen, the procrastination that the public doesn’t/can’t see, and the in-between moments of self-doubt where IMO accountability companions (for lack of a better term) could help.

I also had a matcha coffee chat with another who was coming from a social good point of view. They run a social enterprise and are interested in community-building as a whole especially so in the context of growing the next generation of people in Singapore.

Something very interesting came up during this chat. I had my suspicions about an answer to the kind of community I had in mind, and said friend kind of confirmed it:

Cell groups.

Being punk-leaning in nature, I’ve always disliked organised groups, instead favouring organic groups of friends sharing life stages and striving through difficulties together. Cell groups and churches in general felt disgusting to me from an organisational point of view because “who gave you the authority to tell me who I should be mixing with?”

That was a narrative I would’ve held strongly a decade ago and dismissed, unwilling to differentiate between “what is of man” and “what is of god” because of how closely tied together they are. But today, I can say that I can see the organisational brilliance in terms of how cell groups connect people and facilitate meaningful and authentic relationships. Granted, they’re essentially proxy money makers for churches through tithing, but I can’t discount that the relationships built provide participants a social support network that cannot be found easily outside of religion.

It was also a reminder that for his time, Jesus was pretty punk. Imagine arriving on an alien world and declaring that all other religions were blasphemous, doing things like healing cursed people, and rampaging through temples. Dude was punk.

Now, “if only there were secular cell groups.” I thought.

A “village” (?)

Going back to the proverb I started with:

“It takes a village to raise a child”

What I think I want is a village. Both to raise me, and also for me to raise others. To hold me accountable, as I will commit to holding them as such. And above all, to form genuine and authentic connections while we individually work towards our own goals whatever they may be.

Like bouldering gyms, connections should transcend age; like crypto, there should be a shared objective of profiting except in this case it shouldn’t be a coin or token pumping but in life-maxxing; like churches, there should be an ideal which can never be reached, to strive for.

This time round of contemplating this idea, I have a mission. I’ve just quit corporate and I hope to stay out of corporate (reasons, reasons). I want to learn to make my own money based on the skills I now have. I have no idea if I’ll succeed or fail at this point, but unlike the 27 year old me who would’ve strived to do it all by myself, this time round, I want to surround myself with people who can support me and who I can support in turn.

But building a community is a huge undertaking:

1. What can be the true north of this community that unites everyone?

2. What types of people should be part of this?

3. What value can/should the community provide to its members?

4. What social structures will be in place?

5. What events/happenings can help to facilitate community bonding/growth?

6. How should the community grow in terms of both numbers and quality?

7. How can the culture be maintained while growing?

8. Can something like this be run as a side-project or does it require a full-time intervention?

9. If it requires a full-time role, should the community be making money?

10. What value can this sub-community provide to the wider community?

There’s also the elephant in the room of how inclusive can/should such a community be in order to maintain a certain type of culture. You generally don’t see weirdos in cell groups even though churches are supposed to be inclusive. Or you might, but they generally don’t stay for long, as welcoming as these groups are.

Conversely, the kind of people that general society might label as weirdos have shown they can form healthy relationships with each other when placed in an environment where they feel safe. We can see this happening in different niche communities like the serious metalheads, skinheads, the otakus/weebs, K-Pop idol chasers, card game fantatics et cetera

Generally, I’ve observed that communities start out with a core group of people who set the initial tone for the group’s culture and direction. In the name of inclusivity, more people join till it reaches a tipping point where the original culture and direction — which was the reason people joined — gets diluted and sometimes even overturned. The community dies/slowly fades away, a new one begins, rinse and repeat.

Why can’t there be something that lasts?

Is being non-inclusive a necessary evil to build a community that works for a specific group of people in a sustainable manner?

Sandbox comes to mind as such a community that works and which is discriminatory by nature. They’re designed for go-getters, advertised as such, and have an interview process to ensure the culture of their community.

Not very very sure of where this will go, and I’m not even sure if there are enough people who resonate with having such a community. I’m also acutely aware that whoever it starts with, it will evolve according to the direction of the people. If a community doesn’t take on a life of it’s own, it’s not a community, it’s a dictatorship/club.

Here’s to a potential new beginning!

Up for coffee/matcha?

I’m sorry if you began reading this thinking I’d have a solution. I don’t. Yet anyways. That’s for part two. But if what’s written so far piques your interests, I’d be delighted to get to know you and see how this village could move forward.

If we already know each other, Telegram works best. Otherwise, you can send me an email from https://hi.joeir.net/#contact

Cheerz

This piece was originally going to be written along the lines of “taking a career break and why you should consider one too,” but I decided it wouldn’t be true to form for a platform that I’m calling a journal; because it’s obviously not all rainbows and butterflies and I don’t want to disrespect the experience.

Instead, I want to savour it in it’s entirety, both the positive and negative aspects of it. And write about it as authentically as I possibly can; in the hopes that someone feeling the same way can gain the courage to act on their intuition, find solace in having their feelings validated, or even feel comforted to just know that they’re not walking a path that no one has walked before.

It’s been 6 days since I left my employment with my most recent company that I’m writing these first words. I’ve been with them for close to four years, and saw the company grow from a 5-person team sitting in an office with no windows into a global organisation with around 70 members operating in multiple regulatory regions.

Given the timing of this experience, my tenure with the organisation saw the start of the Ukraine/Russia war, the Gaza conflict, and ended off with the US/Middle-East one. The market has been shit for the past three years in other words, and the flow of money behaved accordingly. Arguably, this resulted in pockets being tightened, teams staying lean, and people having to operate at fuller capacity in general.

I was one of those people.

Being a founding engineer comes with benefits and disadvantages. I brought up the infrastructure for the organisation single-handedly, contributed code for systems that are still in production today, did my best to keep security airtight, led compliance certification audits, and even led the global expansion effort in terms of the technology stack. It was fun, until suddenly it wasn’t.

For the whole of the past year, I haven’t had a proper good rest. Waking up refreshed is my current pipe dream. My body has seemingly adapted to the constant stressors and now wakes itself up after 6+ hours of sleep, tired yet unable to go back to sleep. And the first instinct I have upon waking up? Check Slack. Yes, even after 6 days after being free of any corporate responsibility.

Security and availability issues can happen at any time and the combination of being both a founding engineer and the head of my discipline, together with a tight market, meant that I was a single point of failure for many things. Infrastructure change requests? That’s me, rightfully so. Possibility of security incidents? Check. Compliance incidents and notifications? Yeah that’s me. Web application is down? Somehow I’m tagged even when engineers had access to all their own metrics. Someone forgot their password? Strangely that was on me too.

Given my team was a grand total of three at its peak, you can quickly imagine how I failed to deliver on more strategic things that were actually in my area of expertise. Especially so since I had to play both the role of the architect and the implementer. The constant context-switching, having to learn how to navigate compliance and IT management processes in a just-in-time manner under time pressure, along with the constant reprioritisation of direction, proved too much for me on top of what my core responsibilities were.

And all that is a very long winded explanation of how it came to be that I couldn’t truly “switch off”. But there’s more.

In my opinion and experience, a sense of self-belief comes from established neural pathways. When success is consistent, even at small things like getting daily Duolingo lessons done or taking daily vitamins, success becomes in the eye of the beholder, an inevitability. When failure is consistent, even at small things like remembering to check in with someone on something, failure becomes that inevitability.

I stretched myself to do an increasing number of things — it was definitely fun while it lasted though — and I obviously began failing at some, spectacularly even with a few. At some point, no man can be an island/department, but my request for more people on my team was never prioritised. Together with a startup’s natural need for constantly changing priorities according to market forces, I reached a point where perceived failure, or deprioritisation, became the status quo.

And I believe these failures have somehow seeped into my neural pathways after four years.

Even as I write these words, there’s a whisper that floats along which sounds like “this piece of writing will be left in your drafts/you’ll never finish writing it in a way that you want”. It’s not a strong voice and I can still push through it, but to me, the fact that there’s even a whisper that’s out of my conscious control, is a problem.

Is this burn-out? To be honest, I don’t know, but it is part of my personal burn-out experience; unless someone more woke informs me otherwise.

The breaking point for me was when someone I pushed really hard to hire, left before me. This person was someone whose domain expertise and experience were extremely respectable. To me at least. If even they weren’t enough to effect change, could I hope to do so? I was already considering leaving the organisation before they joined, but they convinced me to stay. Once I knew about their resignation, I began re-evaluating my life decisions and within a week, I concluded that it was truly time for me to move on.

Being a founding engineer also somehow meant that I had a notice period of three months; I’ve heard recently of people getting rejected from roles for having two months of notice. What were my chances?

So I quit without a plan.

After I sent in my resignation, I began interviewing. Got through the first few rounds for a highly paid dev role — which was a win because apparently I still got the l33tcode in me — but got rejected because they didn’t like that my current role wasn’t directly related to writing code; and then I got through to the first interview for Iterative, an early stage VC firm, with a pet project I had been working on on the sides. Got rejected for that because of a lack of proof of validation in the SEA market.

That was about when I decided that a career break was due. And it was also at that point when I noticed the mess that was my thoughts. Not sure which came first, it’s been about three months. In anyways, I felt like I was reaching out in too many directions without a focused target. I was likely in panic mode.

And that led to a period of conscious metacongitive reflection that has lasted till now.

I wanted to identify the thought patterns I acquired — both knowingly and unknowingly, constructive or otherwise — after ten years in the industry. I needed to assess which to keep and which to change in order to meaningfully move on in life. I’ve always disliked the idea of getting through life by just going through the motions because I don’t want to look back and regret about not having done this or that, or not having given myself a chance to do this/that. It’s nice to say “I could’ve been ______ if only I had tried”; it’s less nice IMO to have to live that experience because why didn’t I just fucking try?

And I want that time for myself to do that to be now.

It’s only roughly a week since I’ve stopped having to worry about my Slack, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped worrying about the now-imaginary Slack. Actions taken over a few years become habits. Neural pathways, neural pathways.

I still haven’t managed to have a proper rest and wake up refreshed. But it’s okay, on exercise days, I actually manage eight hours before I wake up. But yes, I wake up still tired.

I had motivation to do things once I was “freed” yet frankly I have been just indulging myself for the past week with photowalks that make me happy, and lying on the bed doomscrolling because I didn’t want to do anything.

What I have felt though after this one short week, is being able to slow my thoughts down. I’m no longer so instantly overwhelmed by complexity that I mentally give up before I even start, and I’m relieved to say I’ve gotten bored of doomscrolling for the past few days and have regained a slight bias for action. I’ve also started responding to friends in a timelier manner (God bless them) and even finally had a meeting with my poor insurance agent who had been messaging me for years without a response.

Things are looking good, but I’m not taking that for granted and I might probably lapse into doomscrolling some days going forward. Knowing what I know about human systems and psychology, I know it’s a roller coaster ride in front of me.

But to me, that’s okay. I think.

One thing I believe in is that creativity and innovation come from a place called boredom. The capacity to be creative, innovate, or have motivation, has to come from a place of stability/rest. It’s like how you can’t jump high if you don’t have a stable footing.

It’s time to regain my stable footing so that I may jump higher some time in the future.

Which begs the question, what’s next for me?

I want to have an answer, but I don’t and I also think I shouldn’t at least for now. What I’m dabbling in and are having thoughts about now though, are:

1. Starting a home-based matcha cafe for fun and also to test the market’s willingness to experiment with distinctions in matcha flavours in a similar way to how coffee has taken off

2. Starting a tech consultancy offering fractional technical leadership to startups going from zero-to-one, leveraging my experience in startups and in technology

3. Starting a tech company doing simple, cross-platform everyday tools extremely well in terms of user experience for specific user profiles

4. Trying out photography as a profession just as a try-out since I really like taking nice pictures

5. Starting a humans-systems-informed community of builders that facilitates both growth and accountability, mainly because I want one for myself

And this brings me to a close for this thoughts/reflection piece. Since I’m fundamentally jobless now, I’m open to new experiences if you have any to invite me to. Or also if you’d like to collaborate on any of the very-nascent ideas I have above. If we already know each other, hit me up on Telegram/WhatsApp, otherwise hit me up on my website at https://hi.joeir.net/#contact

Cheers and here’s to better times! 🥂

In February, I bit the bullet and hit the Check Out on Shopee with the Ricoh GR IIIx in my cart and as many vouchers as I could dig up.

It’s now March — many photowalks have been done including a trip to Indonesia — and it feels like some reflections on the experience is due; so here’s how my first month went with a Ricoh GR IIIx: how I found out about the camera, why I chose to get it, some sample pictures, and some quality-of-life accessories I got

The Ricoh GR series

I first came across the Ricoh GR series of cameras after wondering if there was a smaller, more lightweight camera than my Fujifilm X-S20.

Make no mistake, the X-S20 is awesome and I still really enjoy shooting with it. There’s the famous in-built Fujifilm film simulations, and it works like a proper camera that gets me shots that can be posted straight-out-of-camera.

The first-world problem I faced though is it’s size, and the fact that it still looks like a proper camera.

The size: The X-S20 is a mirrorless body and while definitely small by SLR standards, it’s not that small that I would bring it along with me everywhere I went without any thought. It was still a decision to be made because it was still a separate bag I’d have to bring along.

Looking like a proper camera: Along the way of my rediscovered photography hobby in my thirties, I found that I now actually really liked taking candid shots of people doing interesting things or being in weird places. More so than the usual landscape shots or architecture/patterns stuff. Having a camera that looks like a proper body tends to cause people to behave which was not what’s constructive to getting genuine snapshots of any social environment.

So like anyone half tech-savvy in 2026, I asked our AI overlords for recommendations. The Ricoh GR came up, I searched for example shots on Instagram, and the Instagram algorithm decided to go apeshit on me with beautiful pictures shot on the Ricoh GR series of cameras.

I was convinced in less than a week and after about three weeks and a positive affirmation from a friend who owned one, I checked out the Ricoh GR IIIx from my cart. It was one of three left being sold by an official distributor 😅

Why Ricoh GR IIIx?

A valid question since the Ricoh GR IV had just launched in August-September last year.

While I was researching on this line of pro-specs-yet-compact cameras, one thing bothered me: The base GR (no x in it’s model name) used a 28mm-equivalent lens. If you’re not into photography, this focal length — and consequently framing — is roughly equivalent to a phone camera’s field of view at 1x. With my iPhone, I’ve usually always taken photos at 1.5x-2x.

I prefer the more “close-up and personal” feel that ~1.75x gave without invoking the digital zoom at > 2x. Reviewing my past photos from my X-S20, I also noticed that most of the shots I really liked were done at 75mm.

Could I really be stuck with a 28mm and be happy?

I use the 18-50mm (28-75mm equivalent) zoom kit lens on my Fujifilm; and so the first thing I tried was tried shooting exclusively at 28mm with my Fujifilm for a few days. I didn’t like it. I almost always cropped.

Then I tried shooting at 40mm with my Fujifilm and it was like the stars aligned and chorus of angels sang when I reviewed the footage. I felt almost no need to crop on most of the shots. Also, instead of being like a creep shooting at 75mm (I get to stand further away), it forced me to go closer to the subject, but the resulting shots were *chef’s kiss* (to me at least).

So the Ricoh GR IIIx it was. The Ricoh GR IIIx as of early 2026 is the only camera in the GR series with a 40mm.

It also helped my decision-making process when I found out that the GR IV was sold out across the whole of Singapore (okay it’s not truly sold out, there are shops doing parallel imports with stock selling it at a 200-300 SGD markup, and those only come with shop warranties, not official Ricoh warranties) and also in Japan which I’m visiting in a month’s time. Waitlists went up to 2-3 months, and I wanted to not have to lug along a proper camera body to Japan.

So I dug up all the Shopee vouchers I could find and made the purchase. There were only three left at TK Fotos (it’s now completely sold out), which was the only official distributor store that still had stock for anything Ricoh.

The journey so far

Since I’ve gotten the camera, I’ve taken it out on multiple photowalks to Chinatown and the main downtown area of Singapore, and also to Indonesia. I wanted to get really familiar with the camera before my upcoming trip to Japan where I want to not have to bother about thinking about my settings and shoot with carefree abandon.

Also, the streets and suburbs of Indonesia was always a place I wanted to capture properly, but the wife said bringing an expensive looking camera was a no-no, so all I had so far were shots from my iPhone.

So, here’s some of the sample pictures put into random collage templates with Canva:

Sample pictures from photowalks

Chinatown (Lunear New Year Festival)

This was the night right after I got my Ricoh, what else would I do other than a maiden photowalk? These were the resulting photos taken using the aperture-priority mode with default settings (I wanted to test what it’s base performance was like):

Almost all were straight-out-of-camera with little-to-no-editing done. I liked it. Could also be a placebo effect but I felt less people giving a shit about me taking photos as compared to when I was shooting them with the X-S20.

Holiday in Surabaya, Indonesia

Then came my trip to Indonesia to celebrate Chinese New Year with the wife’s side of the family.

Indonesia has always been tricky because it can be dangerous to wield anything that looks expensive looking there. It’s a place where the rich dress down and the most massive houses are hidden away behind other already-big-but-not-that-big houses.

The Ricoh GR with it’s form factor and discrete colour, passes off as a cheap compact digital camera if you didn’t know any better, perfect for bringing to such places. I could finally take some high quality shots there, and here are some of them:

During this trip, I found out that I also really appreciated the manual mode on Ricoh which isn’t available on the usual compact digital cameras.

Some of the shots above were done at > 1/1000s shutter speeds because I was shooting from a moving car (in Indonesia everyone uses either a motorbike or car to get around, walking on the streets is extremely rare).

Chinatown again (sans Lunar New Year)

Back in Singapore, I found I was taking the camera with me everywhere I went. I didn’t even have to think about whether I was willing to add an additional gadget. The size of the Ricoh GR makes me put it in my pocket when I go out and I’m not even kidding about this.

It’s become an everyday carry that’s like my phone. And because of that, I caught these shots when walking from Shenton Way to Chinatown to take the train home.

Kampong Glam (Ramadan Bazaar)

Decided to include one of my more recent photowalks because I thought this demonstrated the colour grading of the camera pretty well.

These were all straight-out-of-camera using the Positive film setting and a customised aperture-priority mode. Vivid af eh?

Other notable samples

High contrast scenes

A technical aspect of the camera that IMO is worth covering is how the RAW files fare when put into an editor. As a hobby photographer, I’m not a big fan of editing (hence Fujifilm, and now Ricoh), but I thought it would be useful to assess its performance incase I ever wanted to begin my editing journey.

Here’s a high contrast shot taken along MacPherson Road during sunset with intense highlights and dark shadows, straight-out-of-camera:

With just very basic editing skills and the free Affinity editor, this was the result:

You can see the details that were still captured in the RAW file from the clouds which had its highlights highly saturated in the straight-out-of-camera JPEG output, and also from the heavy shadows on the left which had a surprising amount of details given it looked almost black in the JPEG output.

Macro scenes

One feature that I found to be a pleasant surprise was the availability of a macro mode. It was pleasant surprise because it’s actually quite powerful. Here’s a shot that demonstrates its power:

And for funsies, I edited the RAW file for practice:

No pictures of the flower from far — didn’t intend for this to be a showcase piece — but this flower is a yellow dahlia and was roughly 3 inches in diameter. the insect on it was smaller than a mosquito

High shutter speed scenes

TBH I haven’t really shot from moving vehicles before since I never got to bring the X-S20 to Indonesia, but this also meant that I was able to assess it’s performance at high shutter speeds.

Here’s some samples at >= 1/800s from a moving vehicle that’s moving at around 50-60km/h

Landscape scenes

One aspect of the GR IIIx that I was slightly worried about was whether it’d feel constrained when it comes to the field of view. A 40mm is definitely not as wide-capturing as a 28mm, but I still found it acceptable for my own needs.

It doesn’t have that ‘wow’ factor as compared to shots from a 28mm which can capture more things, but for me at least, it’s not a problem given the quality of the photos this camera outputs. In fact, it also forces me to better position figural subjects in any landscape shot I’m try to take. Examples:

For this shot above, more things on the left and right wouldn’t have helped the photo anyway, and the contrast between the warm lights on the left and the cool buildings on the right became the target to capture.

For this shot, I actually wished I had a slightly wider field of vision. But in the grand scheme of things, this is pretty okay methinks.

Another scene where I wished I had slightly more on the left and right, but again, I’m not sure if that would’ve made any real difference asides from adding a slight ‘wow’ factor that would’ve rightfully been felt if you could actually see the mountain.

Things I liked and didn’t like

I’ve got to say first that the number of things I like far exceed the number of things I don’t.

Take these in the context of a hobbyist photographer who likes capturing interesting moments and sights on the street, wants to take nice photos of their loved ones for memories (documentation), and also the occasional social media validation posts. All without the hassle of post-editing where possible.

Five notable things that I like

1. Form factor is probably the biggest win to me. I love how discreet this camera is and non-obtrusive when it comes to taking closer-up shots of people. I also love how I can actually put this in my pocket when going out

2. In-camera colour grading. When shooting with RAW+ (both RAW and JPEG), I can actually apply different film adjustments on the go in-camera. Basic parameter editing like white balance adjustments, brightness, contrast, levels, are also all available. Even cropping is supported.

3. Highlights-based AE metering. There’s an AE metering mode on the camera that ensures that at EV+0, your highlights will never be over-exposed. I found this perfect for street shots at night where the happenings didn’t really matter and I wanted to capture how the light illuminates the street without losing detail around the light source.

4. Macro mode. As mentioned above, this was a pleasant surprise since I never really read about it in most of the reviews I went through before I bought the camera. And it also turned out to be a really high quality one with a nice bokeh around the subject.

5. Button customisations. You can customise what almost every knob and dial does on the Ricoh. The defaults were already very sensible for someone coming from the Fujifilm ecosystem, but being able to set my Fn button to choose my AE-metering mode was super helpful, and so is being able to set the Movie Mode button to change the type of auto-focus.

Five notable things I didn’t like

1. 40mm can indeed feel a bit too constrained for some shots I wanted to take, but given my preferred style of shooting and usage, this is mostly a non-issue. With a fully fleshed out camera setup, you’d probably also miss shots because you didn’t bring a certain lens or wished you brought a different one. To me I’m treating it as just fate and whether I was destined to capture a certain shot.

2. The Image Sync app. For some reason, the app chooses to load preview images of every single image that’s the camera and the space it takes up on my phone grew to 2-3 GB of data within days. Had to change my workflow to load pictures from my SD card to my computer occasionally to prevent the Image Sync app from taking up too much space.

3. Battery life. One of the main gripes of every review, and it’s somewhat true although I can generally get through a day on a single battery by being careful. When not shooting, I have to turn the camera off, unlike my X-S20 which I can leave on for those spur-of-the-moment shots or when I’m hunting for a perfect frame. Also, no WiFi transfers or picture reviews until I know for sure the day’s main shooting is over.

4. Handling. Most reviews praise the handling but if I were to nitpick, this camera is a little small for proper handling with one hand. With the X-S20 and other bodies I’ve used before, I can operate it entirely with one hand. With this camera, I’ve found that I had to use both hands occasionally especially when it comes to shifting the auto-focus point. The alternative is to use the 4-way direction pad to shift it, but that comes at the cost of not being able to activate macro mode/change ISO on the go.

5. Settings saving. Maybe it’s just my expectations from how the Custom/C mode should work (it’s termed U for User with Ricoh), but I found it confusing initially that there were 6 slots but I could only assign 3 of them to the U1-3 modes at any point in time. Also, settings don’t stick unless you save them — unlike Fujifilm, there’s no “save mode” or “forget mode”, you always have to remember to hit save if you want a new setting assigned to the U mode.

Accessories and setup

To end off this post, accessories are something that you’ll most likely want to have if like me, you’re particular about your gear.

When it came to gear for the GR IIIx, I wanted to:

1. Ensure it’s as dust-proof as possible

2. Be able to use it with a single hand as much as possible

3. Keep it safe from impacts

This resulted in getting the following accessories which I think are more-or-less the basics before I’d dare to bring out the camera everywhere:

1. Screen protector — Not a real must but I found myself getting anxious about it especially when I’m dumping it in my pants pocket or side-pocket in my bag 90% of the time.

2. An impact resistant bag — This should hold at least one additional battery (which you should definitely get) and be sufficiently puffed-up or solid to prevent hard knocks to the camera. The camera feels sturdy, but not that sturdy IE if you threw an SLR at someone, the someone would probably get hurt more, but if you threw the Ricoh at someone, the Ricoh would probably get hurt more.

3. Lens to cover the in-built lens — This prevents dust from getting in via the cavity that the in-built lens sits in. This is an issue highlighted by most other reviews, and I chose to address this by using a stick-on lens instead of a hood attachment since this maintains the slim form factor.

4. Cover for the lens covering the lens (lol) — This prevents dust or scratches to the lens you use above. Again, I only got this because I wanted to go with the stick-on lens approach rather than a hood attachment.

I originally got a NiSi hood with a lens filter attachment but I found myself taking it off very often so that I could put it back in my pocket. This got troublesome after awhile so I switched to a combination of a stick-on lens and a cover for the lens.

Example of the camera with the NiSi hood:

Example of the camera with the stick-on lens and a lens cover:

That’s all!

And you’ve reached the end of my Ricoh GR IIIx review.

If you’d like to see more shots with the camera, I post regularly on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/sgstreetsnaps and everything shot in the past month has been with this camera.

On another note, I’m also exploring photography as a possible career path, if you’d like a photoshoot or two done for a low price, hit me up on Instagram or on my personal website at https://hi.joeir.net/#contact

Cheers!

Obsidian is a note-taking tool that’s been on my radar for far too long without any action being taken.

The search begins…

Around 9 days ago, I finally tried Obsdiain for the first time. I was looking for a note-taking software that:

1. Can serve as a daily journal

2. Helps me organise things in a way my brain can process them

3. Could be partially published to the Internet

Notion is great and I still use it for more “serious” documentation, and so is Substack for a place where I can write and publish my experiences and knowledge; but along with my recent rant about my relationship with writing, I realised a missing piece of writing that I would like to engage in: unfiltered, uncensored, maybe unhinged writing that documents thoughts and ideas meant only for my own review in the future.

The time had come for a new tool to be selected. Hopefully a new tool worthy of serving this worthy (or unworthy, perspectives perspectives) brain of mine.

My first week with Obsidian was a mess. Here’s how it went:

1. I tried using two vaults, one for private writing, one for public writing. This was an attempt to have something I could publish easily. I ended up having to replicate notes across both to achieve the kind of graphs that I wanted. It wasn’t the seamless flow that I imagined. Scrapped this idea and went back to a single vault for all purposes.

2. I tried setting up a full-featured Obsidian — like those you can find on YouTube — and failed miserably because none of the workflows worked for me and my Obsidian began to take a minute to load. It’s very very tempting to do this given the amount of Communtiy Plugins there are. Scrapped this and went back to the basics with no plugins.

3. I tried using Obsidian Publish for my publishing. As a software guy, I gotta say the flow is convoluted and unintuitive for someone expecting the first-world experience that Git has granted us in the 21st century. I got my refund in two days.

This took around five days of serious messing around with Obsidian and finding that it didn’t work up to my expectations given the claims of “unlimited configurability” I had read about.

Finding my flow

What ended up working out for me in the end came from the Daily Notes feature that Obsidian comes with out-of-the-box. During my experiments, I’ve also been trying out a daily journaling thing where I would write about the most mundane of affairs:

1. What I did

2. Where I went

3. Who I met

4. Projects I worked on

5. Ideas I had

The one thing I did was to backlink all nouns. For example, if I ate at a restaurant, the restaurant’s name would become a page by adding double square parentheses around it like [[this]]. I would then create a page for it and then dump it into a root /topics folder.

Eventually, a /topics/places folder was created to dump places pages into, a /topics/people folder was created to dump people pages into, and even a /topic/ideas folder was created to dump random business ideas into. You get the idea. I also have similar folders for anime, climbing, code, homelab et cetera. Anything and everything I’ve interacted with resulted in it’s own empty page.

Anyway, here’s a screenshot of yesterday’s daily note as an example; the last point led to thoughts that resulted in this piece you’re reading:

And here’s a preview of what my /topics directory looks like:

I did this as part of my experiments to discover how Obsidian could work for me, and the part that made me realise I was going to be using Obsidian for the intent of unfiltered, uncensored, unhined writing was seeing the graph view.

Here’s yesterday’s graph view which corresponds to the first screenshot showing a snippet of my daily note:

Clicking into Praxium, my friend Louis’s social enterprise, I get this:

And then further clicking into Louis himself:

What all these means for me:

Assuming I don’t interact with Louis very often, and I had a catch-up scheduled with him, I can simply open his page and review when we last met, what we did, and topics that could be brought up.

I imagine this could be super useful in coaching/counselling/human systems proceedings, but also, in every other topic/concept that I come across. Each time I have an idea, the graph grows until it becomes significant enough, at which point I could explore the graph and see if something new can be created out of the concept based on it’s links.

I read some claims about it before, but this concept of links and graphs has — for me at least — turned out to be the greatest thing Obsidian has going.

Publishing my flow

So we come to the second requirement I had which was to integrate how I publish into my writing workflow.

This took a bit longer to figure out but I finally did it with the suggestion of a good friend. This took the form of a framework called Quartz by a human named Jacky Zhao. Check it out here: https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/

I cloned Quartz as a sub-folder in my Obsidian vault, set Obsidian to ignore the infamous node_modules directory (and also the public and docs folder) and then implemented a Git sync with a private repository on Github using the Git community plugin.

• This plugin allows you to automatically commit and sync every X minutes after editing has stopped

  

• This plugin allows you to only track a subfolder instead of having to commit the entire Obsidian vault

  

Using this workflow, I put stuff that I want to publish into a /public directory which contains a Quartz clone. Since Quartz itself publishes from a /content directory, all my to-be-published content goes into /public/content which is the eventual site that is generated.

So after Obsidian syncs with my Github, a Cloudflare Pages worker picks up the changes and does a build based on Quartz. The resulting folder containing a static site is then published via Cloudflare Pages.

No example to show here because the site I am publishing that contains some unfiltered, uncensored, unhinged writing is only meant for close friends. But you can checkout an example from the Quartz showcase page: https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/showcase

Plugins & Hotkeys & Configs

Plugins and hotkeys are two features I appreciate a lot about Obsidian.

Like I mentioned earlier, I tried installing so many plugins that I found myself lost and ended up uninstalling everything. But here’s the ones I kept for my basic setup which hasn’t caused me any lag on both mobile and laptop:

1. Templater — This one helps me create a note based on a template directly from a right click. You can configure which directory to consider as the templates directory and when you create a note based on a template, you can see the available templates from the templates directory

2. Git — This one helps me to publish the public section of my site. Took some configuration both in-Obsidian and in Cloudflare (you could also use Github pages) but this works pretty magically. Sad thing is this doesn’t work on mobile, so my notes actually only get published when I turn on my laptop and this plugin detects changes based on iCloud syncs.

3. Tag Wrangler — This one helps me to easily rename tags. For example, I previously tagged all climbing-related pages with #bouldering. After some time, I realised #climbing was a more appropriate tag. Obsidian doesn’t come packaged with a “Search and Replace All” feature, so Tag Wrangler it is

Some hotkeys I’ve also configured:

1. Show daily notes — Set this to something convenient to access my daily notes which to me is what really powers Obsidian.

2. Move file — I’m still in the early days of my Obsidian vault, this means many concepts/places/people still don’t have their own page. Whenever I create a page, I move it into it’s relevant directory in /topics, and this hotkey helps me wirh that

3. Show local graph — The global graph is admittedly a bit useless, but after journalling a day, I like to view my local graph and explore a little on what links to things that happened today.

And finally some other configurations I’ve done to make Obsidian work as described above:

• Files and links > New link format: Set this to Relative path to file so that backlinking in Quartz works

• Files and links > Default location for new attachments: Set this to a custom named folder assets so that images I dump in wouldn’t all be in the same directory making the index page messy

• Backlinks > Show backlinks at the bottom of notes: Enabled this because backlinks are king in Obsidian

• Daily notes > New file location: Set this to a daily notes folder so that it doesn’t make the root folder supermessy if I forget to move pages into their topic directories

• Daily notes > Template file location: Set this to templates/daily note so that I can have some structure to my daily note. It is currently sectioned as morning, afternnon, and evening but this might change, let’s see!

My current process

To me this process is divided into two segments:

1. Personal note-taking

2. Unfiltered, uncensored, unhinged publishing

And this is my process:

1. Write daily note three times a day (morning, afternoon, evening)

2. Provide backlinks via [[these tags]] to all nouns

3. Review the day via the graph view

4. If an interesting concept comes up, write a little about it in the /public/content/journal directory which mimics a daily note structure

One advice I saw on YouTube about Obsidian was not to rush into setting up a perfect Obsidian because what works for someone else may not work for you. I should’ve taken that advice from the start instead of attempting a pluginmaxxing of my vault.

That said, what I shared above is what I believe to be a universal “How to Get Started with Obsidian” from which anyone else should be able to build on. If the above doesn’t work out/doesn’t sound interesting to you, it’s likely that Obsidian as a tool doesn’t fit how your mind processes thoughts. Don’t worry, that probably just means you’re not abnormal and have the luxury of already processing your thoughts and ideas without aid from an external tool :D

Some notes about other options

It’s getting lengthy, but I thought I’d also document my reasons for not using other platforms and deciding to discover/adopt a new tool. Partly, this is justifying myself to a future me who might wonder why I used Obsidian. Partly, this is also me wanting to provide more context on my thoughts that led to me using Obsidian so that you could make an informed decision on whether to even try and start on Obsidian.

On Notion…

Notion is great but it takes effort to backlink everything properly. I have no doubt that eventually some day Notion might be able to replicate this concept, but given Notion’s maturity and target audiences, it is very very unlikely be a first-class concept like it is in Obsidian.

Notion and other online note-taking platforms also have one fundamental problem to me: they are online. This means that my notes aren’t truly mine. It’s not truly mine because my internet connection isn’t mine and so isn’t the servers that my notes are hosted on.

With Obsidian, my notes are on my device. Yes I use iCloud to synchronise my notes, but when it’s synchronised, it’s on my device. I actually had to indicate in iCloud that the Obsidian vault is something that should be always kept physically on my device. It works.

On Apple…

I’m almost fully invested into the Apple ecosystem. Not an Apple fanboy by any measurable standards, but in my humble opinion, Apple is still doing a pretty decent job of making things that just work.

Like their Journal and Notes apps which are fantastic as note-taking software. Unfortunately, I suspect I have a brain that doesn’t work like how typical humans do. I want the linkage between my Journals and Notes which as of the start of 2026, does not exist. I suspect it might come soon given Apple’s focus on AI recently which could be able to provide backlinks to topics without the hassle of specifically backlinking them with square parentheses.

Tags in the Notes app is also a powerful feature they introduced in recent times, but once again, it doesn’t afford me the backlinking once I click into a tag. I can see pages linked to a tag, but that’s as far as the visibility goes. It’s a two layer graph at best. With Obsidian, I can go into rabbit-holes of my own making. Not necessarily a good thing, but more often than not I’ve found it really useful in reminding myself of other related concepts and events around a topic.

On Substack/Medium

Medium used to be where I did most of my writing, but I noticed myself starting to write for purposes that I didn’t want to. For claps, for validation yada yada. Also, I felt uncomfortable that people had to pay to read my articles (that has since changed and now there are ways that free readers can read your paid articles).

I’m open to going back to write on Medium, but this will be as a dual-publish on Substack which will be free forever. This aligns with my philosophy that knowledge should be as free as it possibly can.

Substack on the other hand, is where I do most of my writing these days. I like the interface, I like how I’m in fuller control of my subscribers, and I like how it’s not as pretentious as Medium (articles only, I’m seeing some of that LinkedInLunatics shit on my notes feed and have since been avoiding that).

These places are excellent for writing and even getting a bit of money from writing (my total payouts from Medium was $30 USD for the whole of 2025), but it also disincentivises what I like to term (you’ve read it 3-4 times by now) uncensored, unfiltered, unhinged writing.

Obsidian satisifies my need for that. Writing without looking back, writing without a need for sturcture, writing without caring about typos, writing so that I won’t forget.

Bye

In the spirit of attempting to write more freely, there is no summary. Do what you will with what you just read.

This is all for now.

Bye.

My relationship with writing goes back to early life. It began with reading; I loved reading when I was young, and this naturally led to writing.

It got to a point that when I played games, I’d even imagine up alternate storylines and write them as if they were my own characters. Being a child, my folks were obviously proud of me, providing an incentive cycle that kept me writing more.

When Geocities and Blogger came about, I blogged almost every day. I loved the concept of having a place on the internet where I could write about my daily life, my struggles (oh little Joseph, what did you know about struggles lol), and reflections. Also no, you won’t find it online because I’ve taken steps to ensure they never see the light of the internet in the 2020s. I see my blog posts from that era in the same way that some people find baby photos compromising/embarassing.

If you lived through the Geocities era, you’ll remember that blogging as a whole became a thing for awhile. Everyone privileged enough to have an internet connection blogged.

And then came shinier websites like Friendster and eventually Facebook and everyone migrated off blogging platforms.

Through it all, I never really lost the habit of writing often even though everyone else around me had. By my twenties in the 2010s, no one was blogging any longer but there I was on Tumblr which was then the latest and greatest. (Yes, these have also been purged)

Then came working life.

I kind of hate it that I began to see writing differently; from being a personal affair, writing became something to do to advance my career, to signal a willingness to share knowledge, to demonstrate intellectual superiority yada yada.

Admittedly, it worked for my career since I’ve always been good with written text. Looking back, this fueled a monster that I am now looking to kill. After ten years of writing for-profit-and-gains, I find that I can no longer write with the intention of introspection.

In one blogpost from my earlier days — which I’m quite proud of looking back — I remember quoting Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living”. That quote summed up my desire to write back then. Man if I could go back in time, I’d give that 13/14 year old dude a pat on the back.

Anyway. It almost feels like there’s this invisible self-imagined expectation to always write something good, something useful, something that people will read, something revolutionary. The expectation that it has to be polished, pristine, and usable is almost second nature to me by now. And I blame Medium for it.

Where writing used to be personal and introspective, Medium made me yearn for claps. In a similar way that people may chase likes on Instagram, writing “good stuff” was my choice of media for getting validation.

I didn’t notice as it was happening but just like that, all of a sudden, I didn’t feel like I had permission to be messy any longer. “I’m an adult, I should write properly, I should have things figured out, I should have structure to my words,” these narratives whispered to me as I wrote draft after draft that I never ended up publishing.

Not sure who I gave the power to grant me permission to write to, but I feel like it’s time to take it back.

All was hopeful, and then ChatGPT came along which to the version of me barely a year ago, was like a twist of a particularly sharp dagger embedded in my abdomen. I say sharp because I had already been stabbed, but there was no blood yet because it was so sharp.

Writing literally lost all meaning for the person I used to be.

What made my words any more useful than an LLM who could come up with all the right answers in less than 10s based on mathematical coercions? What made anything I had to say worth reading any longer? Anyone could just ask ChatGPT or Perplexity something these days and the answer will probably be better than anything I have to write about.

The answer I have now come to is that I need to let go of the habits and expectations over myself built over the past ten years.

Yes, writing in a way that was useful, productive, and informative was a way for me to shine in my first job. Yes, the same kind of writing helped me get into a position where “my reputation came before me” in my second job. And yes, writing for-profit-and-gains has helped me gain connections that landed me my current role.

But at this juncture of my life, I will need to let it all go in order to write authentically again and actually use writing as a way to reflect, document, and move forward with life; which is something I think I desperately need at this point.

Letting go of existing narratives that no longer work is always a difficult thing. Especially so for me since writing is something I genuinely enjoy but haven’t been able to enjoy in recent years because of everything I mentioned above.

I don’t want to need a reason to write any longer.

So let this substack truly be my journal instead of a place where useful information can be found.

I’m returning to my roots.

2025 as a whole really felt like it just flew by and I don’t know why.

Hopefully writing this while looking back at the year that just passed can give me a sense of what happened in 2025 so that I can wrap it up and leave it behind.

Life as 2025 had it

First, some things in point form to jolt my memory *Proceeds to scroll my Photos app

First experiences

• Started living with two very adorable animals

• Visited Japan for the first time and fell in love with it

• Had a whole toenail drop out

• Experienced matcha and got hooked

• Got my first bicycle as an adult

• Visited Batu (Indonesia) for the first time

• Participated in my first climbing competition

• Interviewed with a VC firm as an entrepreneur

• Finally visited the Teamlabs exhibition in Singapore

• Watched the NYE fireworks up close and personal

Other notable experiences

• Picked up photography as a long-term hobby

• Climbed in Japan’s infamously hard bouldering gyms

• Having top quality Kobe beef in a quaint restaurant

• Learnt how to properly use a stainless steel frying pan

• Restored my electric guitar and discovered I could still play

• Mastered the appreggio runs in Smoke on the Water and Iron Man

• Discovered that tater-tots go for $5/kg at supermarkets and never ordered tater-tots outside any longer

• Discovered that salmon goes for ~$15/kg at supermarkets and never bought Salmon fillets individually again

• First flash of grades at climbing gyms (sadly, no new grades sent):

  • 5-bar at Fit Bloc

  • 7 at Boulder Planet

• Printed some climbing t-shirts

• Met Yu from Fish & Bird and Yudai Ikeda (climbing idols) this year

• Witnessed three weddings at three different scales (Sentosa, ballroom, church)

• Became AI enabled with ChatGPT and Perplexity

• Both hired and lost a good mentor

• Gained a newfound conviction to get out of corporate at all cost

• Got my first MacBook in ten years

Falling in love with Japan

I will always remember 2025 as the year Japan captured my soul.

Growing up in SEA, there were obviously many Japanese influences from the technology, gaming, and entertainment aspects. I knew I kinda sorta liked Japan but I never knew how much I’d actually love being there.

Visited Japan as part of my honeymoon trip with the wife in April and to be honest, the thoughts of shifting there has never left me since.

Obviously living there as a resident and visiting the place as a traveler are very different things; but I can’t help but wonder if it’s somewhere I’d really rather be.

Yes the working culture is probably stiff and suffocating, and the unspoken rules of Japanese society, like walking on landmines; coming from an Asian culture though, these things seem to me just like formalisations of the society I already live in. At least in Japanese culture, IMO they’re not trying to hide it.

Will I ever get to live in Japan? Tough given I’ve already settled down, and I have elderly folks depending on me. Do I hope that an opportunity will come for me to realise this dream? It will come with certain consequences that I’d rather defer to a older and wiser me.

Thankfully at least, the wife is open to the idea since both of us don’t really wish to inflict The Singapore Education System™ on our kids if we were to have them. Having four seasons and access to nature are also things we like about life outside of SEA.

Maybe Fuji-san revealing itself to me on the only day I could’ve ever had a chance to see it on my trip is a sign :D

Living the cat-daddy life

I don’t know why but it felt like cats were a 2024 topic. In reality, it was February 2025 that the wife and I took responsibility for the lives of two super adorable creatures.

We actually really wanted to adopt this community cat back in late 2024 after we shifted in but somehow it resulted in a massive conflict with the existing caretakers. We hate drama so we turned to just getting our own elsewhere.

That’s when we found out that shelters and adoption agencies require houses to be fully meshed. Given our apartment is literally next to an expressway, we rarely, if ever, open our windows. Why did we have to mesh everything? In anyways, we ended up getting these creatures from one of the less-fancy fancy catteries.

We only wanted one, but as fate would have it, we got two because we saw how close they were and couldn’t bear to separate them. Helped that the store owner also gave us a bulk discount. Lol.

Just like that, it’s been about a year of living with these cats and watching them grow up.

I initially feared the chaos and mess they would bring; but nowadays, I find that they bring a certain sense of companionship, liveliness, and energy in the house that I really like. Helps that the wife has had experience looking after cats. And also cats helpe a lot when things get tough at work or when the wife is overseas by herself.

Continuing the climb

Every year, climbing continues to feel like an increasingly important part of my life. This year I started off injured and it’s resulted in me more regularly doing stretches, strength training, and rehab exercises.

Visiting Japan’s bouldering gyms this year as well was inspirational in more ways than being seriously humbled. I saw groups of elderly men still going at it in bouldering gyms with a few of them sending really hard stuff that’s at the same level as the young uns.

This year I also had the opportunity to take part in my first climbing competition at the Project Send Anniversary 3rd edition. Visited the event last year during their 2nd edition and regretted not signing up. This year I participated and although it was a bloodbath (I only got up to route 7 out of 30+), it became an experience that motivated me to train harder.

Thankful to have ended the year relatively injury-free with only a slight remaining tweak on my left shoulder that’s a remnant of my injury from way earlier this year.

Corporate life ain’t for me

Wasn’t very sure whether I should write about this one since it’s a concept that only emerged in the last two months of 2025 and also I believe this blog is being stalked by some in my organisation; But I’m feeling like this conviction could be life-path-altering so it’s probably worth a mention.

I started 2025 with the intention to get out of my current role. An excellent mentor changed that and so I stayed so that I could farm experience and insights from him. Unfortunately he left the organisation before I did and I’m back at square one in 2026.

During the time we had together, I was exposed to some corporate realities that didn’t align with my value system. Said mentor validated that these were from his experience what it took to succeed in corporate.

After processing it all, I gained a conviction that I should never have let corporate life drag on after my first gig where I also had another excellent mentor who was also the one that convinced me to join.

I remember already instinctively knowing when I was in university that corporate life wasn’t for me but over the years of being comfortable (not helped by the tech pay bump bubble of the 2010s) I got used to corporate as a way of life. I began to see myself following and climbing the proverbial career ladder. In retrospect it made me feel small, fueled my anxiety, and it ended up influencing my thoughts and way of life. Looking back, the transition was so transparent to me going through it all. I need to reverse that damage done and rediscover my passion (How sia? Hello 2026?)

In a way, to end off, I’m thankful for experiencing what I had which brought me back to my roots. They say that you’ll somehow rediscover yourself again in your 30s, turns out it’s true, at least for me.

Overall ratings for 2025

2025 in retrospect was a solid 7/10 — AKA average — year. Could definitely have been more interesting, but also could have been worse.

If anything, it felt like a year of transitioning into a settled down state of life after the very busy 2024 that saw me get married and own my first house. It was also a year that resulted in me learning that I might never be cut out for corporate.

Will I have to corporate from here on though? Maybe. Will I ever want to from here on? Unlikely. Unless I’ve simply unfortunately experienced the worst side of it (again, unlikely), I will be working towards my own brighter future based on having the freedom to not be bound to corporate culture.

One last gripe that’s been on my mind (because I read stupid horroscopes earlier in 2025) was meeting a “kind person who would offer me an opportunity that I should take in earnest”. I don’t think I ever did meet someone like that. Now last I saw, my horrorscope said 2026 was going to suck. Well, fuck that. No more horrorscopes.

What’s next for 2026?

The short answer is: I don’t know.

What I know is going to happen is that this is the year when I’ll be taking my first career break. It’s been ten years of contributing to society in ways not of my own agency. Some experiences were wholesome, enabling me to form some long term friendships that I’m super thankful for, some others I’m sure vacuumed some life force out of me, hopefully not permanently.

Regardless, it’s time for me to take a break to rediscover who I now am ten years after the last time I actually felt I had free time.

Some intentions I have for now at least:

• Finding a gig as a bouldering gym staff/freelance routesetter

• Setting up a home-based co-working space specialising in good coffee, good matcha, and cute cats (wife needs some convincing I think)

• Delivering food with my bicycle

• Creating small products/services and seeing which generates revenue

• Working on a platform that automates most of the work I do as a Head of Platform Engineering and getting VC-funding to expand it (maybe a bit later after I get out of my current nearing-burnout phase)

• Dropshipping cool stuff and maybe even design/manufacture something

• Joining a social enterprise contributing in whatever way I can

• Joining a government agency to contribute tech skills

How will I emerge from 2026? Lowk excited yet scared to see what happens.

There’s an issue I’m noticing with how leveraging AI in software engineering to deliver products is going:

1. Senior-ish engineers with production experience and deep(er) expertise in crafting software don’t generally need an AI’s help. They never try to leverage it. Egos may even extend to rejecting AI completely in favour of “proper coding”.

2. Junior-ish engineers from a generation that grew up in an Internet-enabled word but without experience or expertise are readily leveraging AI’s assistance. They generate code that’s perfect in their eyes, yet questionable at minimum in the eyes of others.

This is a reality in some places and it’s sad because it’s a self-reinforcing cycle where (generally speaking) senior engineers wait for junior engineers to try out a new tool, assess that the results are lacking (not secure, unmaintainable, reckless etc etc, you get the idea), and dismiss the tool as being of insufficient quality to be adopted.

It’s also not the first of such cycles to happen.

As someone who’s well on my way to becoming a dinosaur for a fast maturing generation alpha, I feel kinda bad for my generation; how we’re literally at the edge of technology creation, yet we find ourselves unknowingly repeating the same self-preserving behaviours of our career ancestors that we scoffed at when we were juniors in the industry.

This behaviour arguably prevented processes like Agile from becoming mainstream until recently (and even then it’s still mainly Agile-but), and arguably this behaviour is preventing our generation from embracing AI as a tool that can fundamentally change how we write code and manage teams that write code.

Anyway, if you’re the kind to read only the introduction/summary and drop off, fine. The key takeaway message from the prose that follows after this is:

1. AI is just a tool.

2. Like any other tool in software engineering, earnest adoption needs to be driven by senior/proficient engineers with production experience and existing expertise in writing quality software.

3. When a tool’s use is driven by junior/low-skilled engineers, there will be maintainability/performance/security/scaling issues — as there would be with any other tool/library/framework entrusted to this group.

4. AI being a tool, is useful for amplifying what exists, not fixing what’s broken.

5. AI will fundamentally change how we code and how we manage teams that code.

AI is a tool

There’s too much hype around AI at the moment that it’s admittedly difficult to really see it for what it is: a tool.

To that extent, mainstream media offers countless counter-productive insights into AI such as:

1. Supervillian persona that is going to murder us

2. A calamity that threatens the sacred covenant of love

3. Blasphemy and degeneration of the arts and culture as we know it

   Cultural Capital

   Can you tell AI from human genius?

   Hello…

   Read more

   10 months ago · 58 likes · 42 comments · James Marriott

Et cetera, et cetera — yes, I’m too mentally lazy to list AI’s many accolades.

It’s fun to generate clout/make money off things the general public doesn’t fully understand yet. And media outlets are lapping it up; in the process, diverting reality from one where AI is simply a tool, to AI being personified as a concept and consequently romanticised; and not in a constructive way.

AI may or may not kill us eventually, but I recently found out through an experiment on a personal project that it does really really well in supercharging the software development process.

When you configure it correctly that is.

Like any other tool.

The failure of the seniors

If you’re of an age where you’ve been contributing to the economy for some time, you’ll likely remember your early starry-eyed days where everything was exciting, new concepts everywhere, so many tools to try out, so much things to learn. You were a sponge that was dry, a fresh balloon that hasn’t seen helium.

One day after enough inspiration has filled you up and you can’t contain it any longer, you walk into a team meeting and bring up some fresh and exciting ideas — to you at least — on how to improve things; how things could maybe be done differently.

And you get shot down. The sponge was squeezed; the balloon let out a little air.

Your suggestions were “naive at best”; they “lacked implementation clarity”; they lacked consideration of “adult, senior” things that could happen because it did happen a decade ago. Whose fault was it? Yours maybe? For not having enough experience as a junior?

Rinse and repeat over the course of a decade, and you find yourself becoming right more often, your ideas accepted more frequently. You find yourself in a senior role.

A fresh, starry-eyed graduate walks into the room with a pocketful of dreams.

You know the drill.

Anyway, my point is, this cycle needs to be disrupted in order for AI to actually have a fair chance at playing it’s part in your team.

And it’s my opinion that because of the complexities and nuances of providing sufficient context, usage of AI’s adoption needs to be driven by seniors who have seen more and arguably are a little bit wiser than their more junior counterparts.

*Cues by-now culturally significant peanut butter and jelly sandwich making video* — go ahead give it a watch if you have time and haven’t watched it, it’s pretty entertaining if it’s your first exposure.

As a senior who has experience in writing code, telling machines what to do is easy. It’s black and white, it either works or it doesn’t, if something used to work and is now breaking, there must’ve been a change. And if all else fails you can spin up a debugger and walk through the lines of code one by one to inspect the state at different lines of execution.

Coding’s nuances are exact and precise.

Which works well because writing code has traditionally been a job that uses an exact method to try and satisfy unclear needs (of businesses). But this exactness isn’t embedded in us by nature, as you can see with how someone newer to this world would’ve given instructions to a “machine” played by a cool dad.

Exactness doesn’t come naturally, it comes through intentional practice, discipline, and experience.

Then came 2024 and in walks AI with a fancy new concept called Large Language Models (LLMs), a blackbox of magic and wonder with promises of writing exact code just by talking to it.

After all these years honing this science and now there’s a way to write code using an unclear method to try and satisfy ever-unclearer needs?

Blasphemous.

But is it?

The “failure” of juniors/the lower skilled

Ignoring something generally doesn’t make the something go away.

Granted in some cases, it does, but for the most part, not managing that something gives it permission to evolve however it wants/needs to; and it might not evolve in a way that is liked or expected.

The epidemic — yes I’m calling it that as a senior-ish engineer who’s seen downtime because of code provided by Cursor and hastily pushed to production — of lower skilled engineers writing code via AI comes from a melting pot of recent industry history; Coding became a hot skill to deliver services, offshoring became a hot trend to balance the balance sheets; and then this hot $20 USD/month blackbox of LLM wonder came into the picture, say no more.

It’s complicated. It’s reached a stage where I’d be legitimately worried if someone I was interviewing didn’t know how to effectively use an LLM to achieve what they needed to. On the other hand, I’d also be legitimately worried if someone I was interviewing only knew how to use an LLM to try and achieve what they wanted to.

And there lies the problem IMO.

Oscar Wilde once said “Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.” Updated for relevancy to this article, AI imitates life far more than life imitates AI (although that is changing).

LLMs given how they’re created and how they work result in them being an excellent imitator of life. The problem: we’re assuming life as training models know it, is full of good code.

Just as an example, telling an LLM to write code for an authentication function without any further instruction is basically telling it to give you the aggregate of how the world creates authentication.

And where do LLMs aggregate their model of the world from? You got it right, publicly available open-source projects on Github. Cross your heart, you know it’s a code dumping ground where the vast majority of authentication functions are for apps that will never see the light of capitalist glory, get poked holes in through penetration tests, or get devoured by bug bounty hunters.

One doesn’t simply open-source enterprise code and the majority of senior engineers who actually know how to write/architecture critical aspects of a system are too busy making their bucks with whichever company they’re at. This leaves the majority of publicly available Github with code written by junior engineers who feel the need to have portfolio projects because companies these days be asking for fifteen years of experience for three-year old technologies.

No one would blame a junior engineer for storing passwords as a MD5-hash for a personal project right? Hunger pays, and coding skills taste better at a discount.

Same goes with the infinite black-hole of “I can write an app, so can you” tutorials online — most of which replicate each other and amplifies the signals of beginner-level code. And yes, any LLM has probably taken those into account at some level of their training.

My point is, LLMs are a good imitator, but it can only imitate what it has access to; and what they’re imitating is probably not stuff you’d want in your codebase, junior anon.

And so maybe, LLMs aren’t at fault (spoiler: they aren’t) and it’s the configuration (context) we provide it. You wouldn’t blame Kubernetes for an app being unavailable if you’d set the app’s replica count to 1 would you? … Would you?

The more junior a person is, the more likely they are to be unaware of how they could shoot themselves in the foot.

Which admittedly goes back to it being seniors’ failure for the lack of engagement/management regarding new technologies when such failures happen.

For not providing… Context.

AI is an amplifier, not a fixer

If you’ve watched the PBJ instruction video above, you might be thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if machines just understood us?

The good news: with LLMs, machines just got one step closer to understanding us. The bad news: it’s not understanding us as we understand understanding.

A very simplistic overview of how LLMs work: A model receives input by a human, converts it into a sequence of vectorised tokens, processes these tokens through neural network layers that select for the most-likely token associations, and finally generates output by selecting the most probable next tokens, which are then converted back into human-readable text.

Fundamentally, machines’ understanding is still statistical in nature.

What this means functionally is that “write me code to authenticate users” will generate an authentication system which is an aggregate of all authentication methods that’s been indexed in the LLM’s model and embeddings (AKA publicly available Github repositories serving as anon junior devs’ portfolio projects as I talked about earlier).

If it so happens that passwords are statistically-speaking mostly stored in plaintext/MD5, without any further context, the LLM would generate the authentication and store passwords in plaintext/MD5 in your database.

We can solve this by… You guessed it, providing context.

But how?

One way is via an AGENTS.md which is documentation for AI agents to work on a codebase. Another way which LLMs gain context of a codebase is via the same codebase it’s working on.

One nice thing I observed when I started generating code for my personal project with an LLM was that even without mentioning it in an AGENTS.md file, Codex could infer a function’s usage based on it’s name and the naming of it’s input. It wrote the code exactly like I would’ve.

For example, in the spirit of making it easy to do the right thing, I implemented utility methods for validating things like IDs and for things like executing certain types of MySQL statements. These looked like:

• validate.Uuid(…) for validating if an ID is a UUID.

• mysqlExecuteSelect(…) for executing SELECT statements in MySQL by passing in what I termed an insertMap mapping field names to values. These would be parsed into field names, `?` placeholders for the statement preparation, and a list of actual values for input for the execution.

• handleOrgSelection(…) which handled a UI flow for selecting an organisation to apply an action on when an organisation wasn’t specified in the --org flag

Codex managed to find these and use these in code I requested for it to write. Without. Me. Telling. It. To.

It felt like magic the first time I saw it happen. Going through the thought processes of Codex after that, I saw that it managed this by first going through:

1. Files in the same package as the code it was implementing

2. Files consuming the package that the code was being implemented in

3. Any code related to what I was asking it to do (eg. A change request containing org resulted in Codex searching for instances of org across my codebase)

This meant it knew what to do by replicating what I had already done elsewhere in the codebase and injecting light inferences to complete the code that it needed to.

The LLM doesn’t discriminate, it only replicates

At a fundamental level, what I understood from this behaviour is: An LLM doesn’t understand what a “good practice” or “bad practice” is, it merely replicates “practices”. This is fun until you realise that this means it would also replicate a “bad practice” if it existed.

Yes you can ask ChatGPT/Claude questions about best-practices and it can probably answer you better than most interview candidates can, but in the absence of a clear question that it has to answer, it defaults to doing what it was fundamentally designed to do: statistical aggregation.

An AGENTS.md works, but through some experimentation with making a shorter one, it doesn’t work as well as a lengthy one with full instructions and examples on what to do and more importantly what not to do. For reference, the AGENTS.md that I’m using which yielded results that I’m satisfied with is around 400 lines long and covers:

1. Nomenclature — How should stuff be named (eg. use only verbs Create, List, Get, Delete, Update, functions should be named CreateXyz, DeleteXyz, name all variables verbosely [my codebase is in Go] etc)

2. Language conventions — Language/runtime-specific conventions I wanted the agent to use (eg. always specify both json and yaml struct tags, always define types outside of a function etc)

3. System components — Overview of the major components of my codebase with sub-headings for each component and a semi-detailed write-up of what the component does

4. File layout — Where different components reside (eg. where should migrations be? Where should controller-level components be? Where should models be? How should protobuf files be stored and referenced and code files be generated?)

5. API communication — Overview of how components of my codebase were supposed to interact (eg. SDKs/RESTful APIs/gRPC APIs/mTLS etc)

6. Data persistence — How is data stored? How/where should data be stored?

7. Infrastructure — How is the codebase deployed? Which cloud service provider should the IaC be optimised for?

8. Testing — Guidelines around tests, what framework to use, what level of testing is required/ideal/optional, what should be run after a small code change, what should be run after a component-level change

9. Data security — How to secure data retrieval/storage (eg. use a GetRedacted() method for classes containing sensitive data, or hash passwords with Argon)? What to consider sensitive data?

10. Network security — How should data-in-transit be secured? What protocols should be used for cross-component communication (if any)?

11. Automations — What can be run automatically? What should be run given what instructions?

12. Examples — “When told to do X, follow these templates/guidelines”: The more specific you can be, the better you results will be

When given a clear question/context, an LLM can do wonders; to the extent of writing code exactly like you would’ve. When these are absent — as is the case when developers generate bad code — an LLM defaults to doing things the way things have always been done.

This means your mileage will vary based on your own code. Don’t like code that an LLM is generating? Guess what it’s saying about your codebase? Dum dum dum

Post-edit note: Don’t just take it from me, this recent article on InfoQ shows that research from DORA seems to support this notion too.

An AI revolution(?)

One of the shortcomings of my first experience in the world of vibe-coding is admittedly that my personal project has a total contributor count of one. I also had the luxury of spending a month standardising a greenfield codebase and building up a decent-enough AGENTS.md without having to navigate the human dynamics present in any team of software engineers. I suspect most teams won’t have this luxury.

When a codebase is being contributed to by multiple people, things get a whole lot messier. Especially considering that most teams are composed of people with different opinions, aren’t aligned on conventions, or facing codebases too large/complex for any single person to understand every part of it.

Extrapolating from what I’ve experienced and reflecting on how it could affect the industry though, I think AI — assuming stars align and all stakeholders are actively engaged in developing an AI strategy for product development — has the potential to change how software is written. Both in terms of team structures/dynamics and also how code is written; a fundamental change that cuts across both the business and engineering aspects.

Assuming though for a moment that we’ve reached a technology maturity level where all stakeholders from engineering management to leads to engineers are actively engaged in using AI to write code, here’s my opinion of where we could be in a decade:

• Majority of business use-cases will be easily satisfied by AI-generated code.

• Writing code by hand will be a thing of the past. Code will still exist, but it’ll be the equivalent of Assembly to a developer in the 2020s: manually modifiable with some effort, but only few have the expertise to make changes needed for niche optimisations/use-cases.

• Common features in business applications will increasingly start to be delivered by detailed and verbose PRDs/user stories being submitted to an LLM and converted into code.

• High-skilled engineers will be working on unique business needs like complex/custom authorisation models or optimisations at the system level that require architecture-level contexts or integration of infrastructural contexts.

• Crafting contexts and defining boundaries in both documentation and code for an LLM will become a skill by itself.

• What we know as “clean code” today might be a thing of the past and we’ll see a new definition of “clean code”: one that is optimised for an LLM to work on. Think writing seed code using patterns that facilitate context-gathering by an LLM. Think writing code with the intention of letting it be easily replaceable over it being easily reusable.

• Software engineering teams will become leaner than they are now since the act of writing code is no longer a capacity issue correlated with the number of heads in your team.

• Unless things change, we’ll see lower skilled offshore engineers being gradually edged out of the industry in favour of a $20 USD/month AI plan (again, assuming costs remain as they are now) operated by engineers who are skilled at using AI to generate code from requirements; and engineers who can do system-level optimisations/implement features unique to a business.

Definitely some mildly scary, mostly exciting possible scenarios; but then again, I think all of that is only possible if stars align. We haven’t even (can’t?) align(ed) on a package manager for Node.js after more than a decade and it took about a decade for Golang to arrive on Go Modules.

Thanks for reading

I never know how to end off my posts properly. Long-winded summaries sound boring and performative to me so here’s a screenshot of Codex processing a request I made.

See how it even adds validation guards that I’ve maintained throughout my classes?

AI will replace us all someday; long live AI.

If you found this useful/interesting/insightful, in the words of my current boss, subscribe/like/share with your pets plssss :D

I’m well into my thirties and to someone who’s just graduated, I should have figured out this working life career thingy. Well, I haven’t, not fully at least, but here’s my best shot at it.

As I gradually approach the end of my lifespan at my current organisation — as do all founding engineers in any startup that has progressed significantly do some day (but that’s another post for another day) — I find myself wondering what my next career move would be like.

I’ve got a dream title that would probably not be possible anywhere else at my age (Head of …) in an Asian context, I think I’ve built up sufficient skills to lead/guide/mentor engineering teams, and I’m still able to go to — and thankfully still love being in — the trenches to write code.

So, what next?

I figured out one way to go about this was to ask myself: what do I want my next role to mean to me?

And that question led to me thinking up categories of roles that I have both experienced in a lived way or have had chats with others who have experienced them. These are:

1. Bill paying — A role that you take up purely to have a source of income.

2. Lifestyle enhancing — A role that you take up because the pay (or work arrangements or some other company benefit) enables you to further self-actualise either in the present or in the future.

3. Title boosting — A role that grants you a fancy title. Disclaimer: I don’t recommend chasing titles as a rule-of-thumb, but sometimes, having a fake title first opens doors to taking up the proper responsibilities and challenges of the actual role.

4. Network expanding — A role that allows you to meet and connect with people you otherwise wouldn’t have the chance to.

5. Skill acquiring — A role that allows you to learn emerging skills. Think pivoting to becoming an “AI engineer” while AI is in its nascent stages and companies are more accepting of training people up instead of the plug-and-play expectations when it comes to more traditional skills like… writing Java 😛

6. Experience farming — A role that provides perspectives and wisdom. Think “I’ve succeeded at this challenge once in the position of engineer, can I lead the same effort and succeed as a team lead?” or “I’ve done this once before, can I replicate it in a different business environment?”

7. Therapy/karma accumulating — A role that soothes the soul. Your mileage may vary, but for me, this is working with/for the government, social enterprises, or charities.

They’re not mutually exclusive and generally some overlap can be expected unless you’re in an extreme circumstance.

Think taking a career break by working for a charity at half your current pay so your family can still put food on the table, but which also serves to help you regain your humanity after a decade in the cut-throat profits-oriented private sector.

Think moving from a corproate leadership role to a startup and managing a team that’s a quarter of your current team’s size; but having a C-level title instead of a directorship that lets you interact with other C-levels and might eventually lead to a full C-level job in a larger enterprise elsewhere.

None of the choices are always wrong, none of the choices are always correct. IMO it’s a matter of personal circumstance since everyone’s starting point and intended outcomes from their career and life is likely different.

Some further insights. Some questions I’m personally dealing with right now:

1. How do I want my next role to move me towards my career goals? Tbh, it’s mainly: is it time for a break from the private sector? Profits are always nice; money enables nice things; but I can no longer convince myself of the connection of my contributions to helping the everyday man-on-the-street. Which is not nice. Also, the we needed it yesterday / move the needle mindset gets jarring to the neural pathways after some time.

2. What kind of platform am I searching for in my next role? Eg. wealth-building, network expansion. I know for sure it’s definitely not experience farming since I’ve been contributing at a global scale in my past two roles. Is it time I started meeting more people? (My LinkedIn posts get 3 likes on a good day). Is it time I started taking my wealth-generation more seriously? (Yes, I’m an underpaid founding engineer that accepted the equivalent of magic internet money for less pay). Admittedly, remuneration in terms of cold hard cash every month wasn’t a priority for me four years ago; having fun was, but it is becoming a priority ever since I got intimately acquainted with this financial calamity called mortgage.

3. How will my career goals reconcile with my life goals at the end of my career? Shortly after I left round one of my entrepreneurship journey and started out as a starry-eyed professional, my goal became to start an organisation that can both deliver products + be a place where engineering excellence can afford to be a corporate value. Is this still valid if I cross my heart and promise to tell the truth? How will my next career move help me move towards this if so?

All of which are… admittedly a lot to unpack and beyond the scope of a single post. But I thought I’d just share some thoughts from a recurring series of “what next” thoughts that I’ve been having recently. I hope it helps someone out there wondering what approaching mid-career is like!

So, over to you, what platform does your current role provide you? What industry leverage do you want your next role to help you gain?

Heard it said too many times, probably guilty of saying it too many times (with good intentions I promise). But what is the "process"?

It sounds suspiciously like what "they said" where "they" usually turns out to be some mythical being of yore.

Well, this week I had a revelation while cleaning my cat's litter and searching for the clumps amidst the grains.

What if the "process" was actually literally just the proceeding of things and it's the modern woke human's version of "que sera sera/whatever will be will be" or "it's part of god's plan" or "it's my destiny"?

If you're modern and only relatively - not absolutely - woke, you might agree with the more moderate and modern sayings of a recent leader of a fruit farm: "you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards."

And that's the relevation I had.

Maybe trusting the process is just another dimension to the soul-soothing remedies that are "what will be will be" and "everything will be alright".

Looking back at the past ten years of my professional life, and considering a recent professional-ish endeavour I've embarked on, it started to click.

But wait, isn't that in itself begging the question? I wouldn't have the motivation/confidence/skills to pursue my current endeavour if I hadn't gone through the experiences that I had.

If my current goals and how equipped I am to feel confident in myself to achieve them is a result of my lived experiences, then it follows that whatever the experience was, it would've led me to a similar place. Just in a different context; different domain.

And maybe that's what "trust the process" really means.

It doesn't mean you'll achieve what you think your goals are in your current context; but it seems like it means that somehow sometime, things will work out someday in a "grand scheme" kind of way; and you'll be able to look back at all the then-seemingly-unconnected events that helped you prepare for that moment of glory. In that moment, assuming you're the reflective kind, you'll discover a personal interpretation of "trust the process".

The key to me is not the word "trust", but the word "process". It only works if you're "proceeding"; trying, yearning; because when we're doing that, growth is inevitable.

As commonly jokingly rebutted when it comes to physical growth and getting in shape, round is a shape too.

We're always growing whether we intend to or not, and so maybe/probably what really matters is the process we choose to take and the intent we possess that we can trust eventually leads to Good Things™.

Trust me bro, trust the process.

Yes, it was Naruto when I was in my early teens.

I mean, there was Digimon and Pokemon airing on national television in Singapore when I was even younger, but they were dubbed in mandarin and english respectively. At that age, I honestly believed the originals were in mandarin and english.

Then came the age of torrents and file-sharing which gave me access to watch actual anime coming out from Japan. A friend passed me a burned CD-R with the first episode of Naruto and the rest was history.

Well it’s been almost two decades since, and I finally decided to take up the Japanese language as a form of knowledge pursuit. Main reason? I had my first-ever Japan trip planned and I wanted to be able to converse with locals.

I remember learning Spanish only after visiting Spain because I loved Spain and I regretted not knowing Spanish before I visited Spain. I had a hunch I’d love Japan given my main entertainment in recent years has been anime, and I didn’t want to regret not learning the language before I visited.

Learning goals

Frankly my only goal was to be able to travel Japan with ease. I’ve studied enough languages to know that a few months wouldn’t get me up to a point where I could talk with a local and not get responded to in English (it turned out to be true).

But there were other nice things that would happen as a side-effect.

For the longest time, I’ve listened to Japanese popular music. There’s something unique about their sound that draws me to it. Also, it serves as nice background music since I don’t understand the language and what else is a voice other than yet another instrument if you don’t understand what they’re singing?

Sometimes, I’d google about the lyrics to see what a particularly-nice song was about, and… I’d always be disappointed by the broken-English translations. Yet, in forums, people spoke about how beautiful and poetic the songs were and how an understanding of Japanese was needed to grasp the nuances that made the lyrics beautiful.

Another goal for me was born. It was to be able to understand these nuances in Japanese lyrics.

Then there’s that whole thing about being a casual weeb anime watcher. It’s always an inconvenience when I have to leave the screen for a bit and need to pause even though the scene doesn’t contain any action.

Well, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to not have to pause and be able to understand the ongoing conversation while I take a piss?

I had my last goal. So…

1. Survive in Japan

2. Understand Japanese songs

3. Watch anime without subtitles

And I opened Duolingo for the first time in years (I coudn’t remember it but apparently I had joined in 2019 — probably Spanish).

How I’ve been learning

I wasn’t willing to take up IRL Japanese lessons.

The pace of language lessons are generally slow (not without reason, I know) and I wanted to cram as much as possible within four months before my trip to Japan. IRL language classes was not an option.

Duolingo

My primary method of instruction turned out to be Duolingo; which isn’t great if I’m being honest, but it’s sufficient to get exposure to concepts.

IMO the one thing Duolingo did right in their Japanese course was forcing me to memorise the hiragana and katakana (Japanese alphabet systems) character sits once I hit section 2 (out of 5, which should be a JLPT N5++ level).

Memorising the alphabet system helped me a lot in Japan where majority of kanji (the Chinese symbols writing system) found in public/touristy places had furigana (subtitles using hiragana/katakana). Knowing how words were pronounced also meant I could search for them in a dictionary, accelerating my learning.

The part that Duolingo doesn’t do so well in is explanation of concepts. For the most part, you won’t truly understand what they’re trying to teach unless you google the concepts for yourself. For example, there’ll be a section named “Past tense” and you’ll be exposed to sentences that use the past tense, but there’s no lesson on the relevant conjugations that change a word’s meaning to it’s past tense.

Regardless, it was good enough for familiarising myself with the language. After a certain unit where you’re at least aware of the Japanese alphabet systems, Duolingo stops showing you the romanji (the English pronunciations), and that’s where the learning really starts.

A trip to Japan

You’ve probably heard of the “immersion method” when it comes to learning languages.

I thought it was bull, but turns out, being in Japan was actually a huge accelerator in my learning. Turns out (surprise surprise) Japanese is everywhere in Japan. This meant I had so many reference materials to decipher on-the-go. Road signs could be read, so were warning signs, so were handwritten menus at izakayas, and description plagues in museums et cetera.

Then there’s the fact that (again, surprise surprise) Japanese people speak Japanese. Frankly nothing prepared me for how quickly they actually spoke. Duolingo’s listening exercises are like 0.2x speed compared to actual Japanese’s speech.

But that helped. A lot. It was confusing initially but after hearing commonly used phrases a number of times, the pronunciation became clear and with a knowledge of hiragana and katakana, it became easy to figure out what they were saying. Eventually. Like near the end of my trip.

After my trip to Japan, I noticed that my reading was a lot faster — which isn’t saying a lot tbh — and some commonly strung together phrases/particles became natural to vocalise (eg. ます, でした, ございます). Commonly seen words like 居酒屋 (izakaya), 焼肉 (yakiniku), とんかつ (tonkatsu), and ラーメン (ramen) became instantly recognisable.

Singing Japanese songs

Before taking up Japanese as a knowledge pursuit, Japanese songs were just nice and lively background music for me.

Turns out, they’re also a really nice way to learn the vocalisation patterns of the Japanese language. After attempting to learn 3-4 languages, one of the main learning difficulties I found I had was reproducing language-specific sounds. For example the “r” in both Bahasa Indonesia and Spanish is heavily emphasised, there’s even an “rr” tongue-roll in Spanish, and the unique “th"/”ç” sound in Spanish.

Japanese was quite close to Bahasa Indo and Spanish given the heavily vowel-ed phonetics, and the difficult for me mainly came from sequences of alphabets and how they sounded. For example, it’s rare to have consecutive syllables starting with “r” in a sentence in English, but in Japanese there’s conjugations like ーいられる (-i-ra-re-ru) used in たべられる (ta-be-ra-re-ru).

There’s also the collapsing of alphabets like く (ku) when they’re used mid-word (eg. あさくさ — A-sa-ku-sa — is pronounced more like Asak-sa), the collapsing of す into an “s” sound when it’s part of です (de-su), and the collapsing of し when it’s part of でした (de-shi-ta).

Attempting to sing Japanese songs was an interesting learning intervention that I found helped with acclimatising my tongue to the phonetics of the language.

The sites I use for this learning intervention are:

1. Utaten — These are good for an initial reference since lyrics on this site contains furigana (phonetic subtitles) for the kanji.

2. LyricsTranslate — Generally decent English translations of Japanese songs.

Slow-listening practices

Similar to Spanish, I found that Japanese was spoken very quickly by natives. Even if they were saying something I would’ve understood in text, I couldn’t catch it.

Another aspect that Duolingo isn’t so great at was getting me used to how the language would’ve naturally sounded. Duolingo uses a textbook voice at speeds friendly to beginners, which is great for when you’re new to the language, but which doesn’t help when it comes to understanding natives. Actually, a simple tweak they can do is to allow the speed of speech to be adjusted (if somehow you’re working for Duolingo… Please?)

I knew that if I wanted to converse with locals the next time I’m in Japan, I’d have to get used to how natural Japanese speech sounds: speed, quirks, shortcuts, native accents and all.

Turns out that there are slow-paced and beginner-friendly Japanese narrations on YouTube (thank you to all the Japanese bothering to make these!). Watching these helps me to both expand my vocabulary and also get me used to the vocalisation/usage of more nuanced particles (eg. use of から (ka-ra), まで (ma-de), だけど (da-ke-do) etc)

One of the channels that I use alot is @SpeakJapaneseNaturally.

Learning the Kanji before Duolingo taught it to me

One thing I really don’t like about Duolingo is how they force you to learn and use words as hiragana first before introducing the kanji at a much later point.

As a disclaimer, this probably only works for me because I have a background in the chinese language. But… Seeing the kanji made it a lot easier for me to grasp the meaning of words. Turns out majority of kanji has its roots in the meaning of chinese characters as ancient Chinese understood them.

For example, あめ (a-me) is rain and it’s kanji is 雨 which also means rain in chinese. But there are also kanji with slight differences from the chinese meaning in today’s understanding; for example 走る (ha-shi-ru) means “to run” in Japanese, but the character 走 means to walk in chinese.

For every word that I learnt in Duolingo, I made sure to find the relevant kanji and include them in a list on Notion that I maintain for remembering Japanese words. It’s been very effective, although I suspect this method may not work if you don’t have a background in the chinese language.

My main difficulties

So far, Japanese has proven to be the most difficult language I’ve taken up to date. Others online have likened it to the difficulty level of English and I don’t disagree although I’ve never had difficulties with English given it’s my native tongue.

Grammar

The biggest issue I had when adapting my brain to think in Japanese was the order in which clauses were used. Japanese is a Subject-Object-Verb language while English and all other languages I know about were Subject-Verb-Object languages. The sentence-forming thoughts were extremely unnatural though I’m getting better at it.

For example, in English we’d say “I go to the beach in Summer”, in Japanese that would be “夏 (summer) は海 (beach) に行きます (go)”

Particles

Then there’s the use of particles. These will usually be the hiragana that connects subjects and objects or provides the structure for conjugating verbs. These confused me a lot initially especially for particles like が (ga) and は (wa), and に (ni), で (de), and へ (he) which are used similarly but can change the meaning of the sentence

For example, 学校 (school) に行きます (go) means I’m going to (eventually be exactly at the) school, while 学校 (school) へ行きます (go) means I’m heading towards school but doesn’t mean I’ll eventually reach the school. Another example where you’re not going to but instead are doing something else there, instead of に, you’d use で, for example 学校 (school) で踊ります (dance) means I’m going to dance at the school.

Particles extend beyond that and more recent ones I’ve learnt are から (ka-ra) which means from and can be used as such as in 一時から (from 1 o’clock), but actually has a deeper meaning of “emerging from/as a result…” which means it can be also used as a connector to provide a reason for something else happening. For example お腹が空きからたべれる (my stomach is empty so I can eat)

Conjugations

Probably the hardest part of Japanese IMO.

Some time into learning Japanese, I started wondering why there wasn’t a word/phrase representing “can” (as in “I can go”). Turns out, it was accounted for as a conjugation using the え alphabet (ie 行けます). It also turns out, negation was also a conjugation using the あ alphabet (eg. “I can’t go”: 行かない). So was instruction (eg. “let’s go”: 行くぞう).

Verbs in Japanese come in three categories, 一段 (ichi-dan), 五段 (go-dan), and irregular. Conjugation patterns differ among all three, and within each is a whole host of possible changes in meaning.

Then there’s the adjectives which come in two main categories, い (i) adjectives, and な (na) adjectives.

Definitely haven’t reached 50% of the known unknowns, but learning conjugations — and gaining the intuition to what’s a “correct” conjugation — is probably the next hurdle to me right now.

What next?

So I’m done with my Japan trip, do I still have a reason to continue pursuing the Japanese language?

もちろん！ After visiting Japan for the first time, I’m convinced it’s a country that I want to return to. Definitely as a vinyl umbrella and matcha wielding gai-jin, and potentially as a resident. Frankly I’m considering the possibility of living there for a while, hence the Japanese language is something I want to keep learning to keep that option open if an opportunity ever emerges.

After growing up and living in Singapore for most of my life, I yearn for the seasons. It’s a nice phenomenon that gives a sense of the passage of time (and also Spring to look forward to).

Being Asian-looking also means that in the majority of countries I’ve travelled to and loved — which were mainly in the northern and western hemispheres — I stuck out sorely amongst the locals.

In Japan, I passed for a local with flying colours. Most Japanese spoke to me in Japanese at first and there wasn’t discrimination based on first glances. There was after I opened my mouth though, but anyways, language is something that can be learned over time, skin colour and how small my eyes are can’t be changed that easily.

And that’s all that matters I suppose.

Here’s to hoping my Japanaese is at least marginally better this time next year.

“Tech debt boo, engineering excellence yay.”

You could say that all you want — as an engineer, those are my fundamental sentiments too; but it’s also a Fact of Life™ that tech debt will always happen; and I argue that it’s in fact necessary for any application/product/service that’s actually being developed upon; any application that’s actually growing.

If there’s no tech debt, it follows that the product’s not evolving, and that spells trouble for you because… Why isn’t the product growing? Are there no new customers? Are there no new features being requested for?

Tech debt exists because abstractions always break.

Design decisions made with a product’s best interests can become tech debt in a year. In a fast-paced startup environment, it may even be termed a bad life decision in a matter of weeks.

But that’s OK.

Tech debt means that the product is actually existing in a realistic world with realistic users. Real users fuck things up, real users change their minds ever so often, real users seek new things. It’s a human condition to seek progress and therapy/executive coach-types even have a term for this — it’s a VUCA world we live in.

VUCA: Volatile. Uncertain. Complex. Ambiguous.

It is as it sounds and this is reflected in tools we create for each other as humans to use. One day, we’re happily using a piece of software, the next we’re demanding that the software do more than it already can. And we needed wanted it yesterday. So a change request is raised; a contract to deliver it in 3 business days has been agreed upon; the change is made in 3 business days.

3 business days (arbitrary, YMMV) isn’t enough to patch an abstraction, much less restructure it.

After much sighing from junior ‘uns and grumbling about how the company doesn’t care about the craft; after much coddling from seniors and leads about how “we’ll fix it someday”, the change is pushed to production; because someone paid for that change to be done within an expected timeframe.

And the cycle repeats ad infinitum.

Since tech debt is a given (I hope I’ve convinced you by now), how can we as technical people handle the soul-crushing realisation that we’re just tools to deliver a product that makes money for a capitalist organisation? How can we maintain our pride and passion about our craft as people who are genuinely interested in building things that last?

Can we actually be craftsmen in the first place?

After three years spent bringing a high-growth startup from pre-seed funding to series A, my answer has everything to do with the philosophy behind the Japanese practice of Kintsugi.

The philosophy behind Kintsugi is that breakage and reparation is a natural — and thus, expected — process of the life of any given thing. Rather than preventing breakage, breakage is something to plan and provision for. What if craftsmanship meant accounting for an imperfect, partly-broken-but-still-working thing to continue existing?

As a self-declared perfectionist myself, that’s blesphemy; but hear me out.

Taking a point of view where things will break while considering we want to keep using those things, we can change how we approach certain practices in the realm of software development.

Like tech debt. Yes, we’re still on that topic.

If we treat tech debt as a constant — represented by cracks on a bowl through daily usage and unadulterated human carelessness — we can then begin to imagine and potentially accept a world where we can live with tech debt without it haunting us at a personal level.

To me, it’s a skill that’s required of every engineering manager: What’s your relationship with tech debt and how do you handle it as a recurring nightmare concept?

Answers may vary according to life experience but a correct answer is never to try and prevent it completely.

And it’s not even from an ideal of honing one’s craftsmanship: A software with ongoing new features/change requests means I can be somewhat sure I’ll be paid in the near future. Part of it is self-serving.

To me, one answer to handling tech debt that has emerged relatively recently to me given the experiences of the past few years, is to standardise the tech debt.

In general, standardisation is accepted as a Good Thing™ in engineering circles, though we rarely think to apply it to tech debt. It’s usually a hack here, a hack there — an unregulated mess.

What if we accepted tech debt as a way of life and applied our obsession with standardisations on them?

Standardised hacks mean standardised fixes.

Assuming you’re in a team building a product that serves actual users in an actual world, there will eventually come a time when the team size grows; people without context of a codebase’s past will onboard. When that time comes, an unregulated mess of hacks will be almost impossible to understand even if the capacity to fix it has realised itself. You probably know this as legacy systems — systems no one wants to touch less some organisational elders.

IQ — the capitalist’s idea of intelligence — is measured by our ability to recognise patterns and apply solutions to these patterns. Professional software developers are generally above average when it comes to this measurement, which means that tech debt from standardised hacks can be resolved with much less effort than an unregulated mess of hacks.

In the world of live performance, there’s a (half-serious) concept where if you play a wrong note once, it’s a mistake; but if you play the wrong note twice, it’s art. Miss a semi-colon once, it’s a compiler error, remove semi-colons altogether, you get Python.

Easy to say though, I hear you say. What does that even look like?

In code, what this could look like:

1. Continuing with directory structures and file naming conventions which the team already knows might need to be changed at some point in future. Think how much easier it is to find an replace a single phrase than to see what each repository/team has done.

2. Do refactors based on proper prioritisation cycles — continue to use a to-be-deprecated function until the task for updating the function has come. It’s much easier to track down the logic of a feature chain’s functions if there’s no functionAlt or function2 in play that does something similar-but-different

Considering the philosophy behind Kintsugi opens us up to wisdom we wouldn’t acquire if we fall back into patterns of “something is wrong, let’s fix it now” and “product needed it yesterday”.

IMO it allows us to be responsive instead of reactive; which is something that’s really important especially when trying to engineer things that last in an environment where change is moving at a breakneck pace and hacks are needed to be thrown in.

There’s a time for craftsmanship, there’s a time for simply… Delivering.

Especially so in startups, this delivering might continue for an overextended period of time. Everything will seem hopeless and it’s too easy to just give and say “that’s life” and not learn anything from it.

The challenge of being in the engineering discipline in this day and age is to always have the long-game in focus. Even if that means setting aside your inner craftsman to deliver a craft that wasn’t made perfectly. As my personal experience goes, you can dislike what you’re delivering, but acknowledge that it’s still making a difference to the person on the other end using what you’re creating.

Will these hacks ever be resolved?

Maybe the right question to ask is: will the organisation sustain the team financially without those hacks in place?

Tech debt, love it or hate it, is a natural — and maybe even positive — property of any codebase behind a product that works. And sometimes, a product that works… is what’s needed.

Enjoyed my ramblings? Subscribe to it:

Subscribe now

Till next time-

I initially wrote a monolithic post on my reflections about my Japan trip. It ended up way too long; so now it’s split. This is part two documenting the interesting experiences (to me at least) which I had in Japan on my first time there ever.

If you’re interested in part one, it is here:

If you’ve read that/don’t care for it, here’s my list of unique/notable experiences in Japan as a first-time traveller to the Kansai + Kanto region:

1. 🏪 Konbinis (コンビニ)

2. 🛒 Supermarkets (スーパー)

3. 🍶 Izakayas (居酒屋 [い·ざか·や])

4. 🍱 Ekibens (駅弁 [えき·べん])

5. 🍡 Ordering Food

   1. 🎟 Ticket machines

   2. 📱 iPad

   3. 🌐 Reservations on Tabelog

   4. 🗣 Verbal ordering

   5. ✍️ Order sheets

6. 👟 Getting around

   1. 🚌 Local buses

   2. 🚇 Local trains

   3. 🚅 Shinkansen

7. 👜 Shopping

   1. 👕 Secondhand Stores/Flea Markets

   2. 👘 Kimonos/Yukatas/Haoris

   3. 💸 Commercial brands

8. 🧻 Toilets

9. 👁‍🗨 Observation Decks (展望台 [てん·ぼう·だい])

10. 🈺 Goshuin (御朱印 [ご·しゅ·いん]) Collecting

11. ♨️ Public baths

12. 🧳 Luggage Transfer Services

    1. 🏨 Ta-Q-Bin

    2. 🛩 AirPorter

🏪 Konbinis (コンビニ)

It’s 2025, you’ve definitely seen konbinis being featured on some Japan influencer’s channel/blog. As I learnt, the term konbini (コンビニ) is an abbreviation of the term convenience store (コンビニエンスストア) in katakana.

While it’s well known, it’s still a legitimate experience to try in Japan.

There are konbinis with seating areas meant for you to have full meals. If you smoke, some konbinis also have dedicated smoking rooms (smoking is generally frowned upon in the streets) where you can buy a drink and use the smoking room. Many konbinis also have ATMs where you can draw cash if you’ve run out of it.

All konbinis have similar offering for drinks and where they differ is their food offerings. We tried the fried chicken (popularised by FamilyMart’s famichiki) across all the konbinis, and the one that stood out for us the most was the one at Daily Yamazaki which is one of the only konbinis that isn’t operating on a franchise model.

In the order of how much we looked forward to a konbini brand from most to least:

1. FamilyMart — The choice of konbini popularised by influencers. Selection of everything here is legitimately better than the rest. You can find everything from clothing to nail clippers to ready-to-eat meals here. Only their fried chicken loses to Daily Yamazaki. Their melon-pan (melon bread) is better than those found in supermarkets.

2. Daily Yamazaki — Originally a bread manufacturer but they branched out into their own stalls, they’re the only konbini brand that isn’t operating on a franchise model. All their cooked food and bread offerings are really good.

3. New Days — Basically a better Lawson because they carry mainly bread from Daily Yamazaki which is always a nice thing. Mainly operational in the Kanto (around Tokyo) region, didn’t find many in Kansai (around Osaka).

4. Lawson — My least favourite among the Japanese konbinis because none of their hot foods suit my taste. Tried half of the selection there and much preferred variants from FamilyMart/Daily Yamazaki .

5. 7-11 — By the end of the trip, I avoided this when I could. Food is generally not as good as the others, their fried chicken is an even oilier version of famichiki, their breads tend to be more chewy and less tasty than other brands.

Konbini conversation is probably also the first time you’ll have to understand/speak a bit of Japanese. Words to look out for:

1. 袋 [ふくろ] / fukuro — they’re asking if you want a bag, respond with daijobu-desu if you don’t want one, hai if you do

2. おしはらい / oshiharai - they’re asking how you would like to pay, respond with genkin-de for cash, kado-de for card/contactless payment

3. 温め [あたため] / atatame - they’re asking if you want it heated, same responses with the bag

Some konbinis like Lawson have self-checkouts with an English interface too.

🛒 Supermarkets (スーパー)

Konbinis are nice and all, but it’s the supermarkets where pre-prepared food really takes off. Prices are lower as well and you can expect discounts on all perishable food items starting from 6pm.

Around 5-6pm, a staff member in an apron will start walking around pasting stickers on items. The following are what each means:

1. X 割引 (waribiki — [X*10]% off)

2. X 円引 (enbiki - X amount of yen off)

3. 半額 (hangaku — half price)

Generally it starts from 10% off and by 9PM comes the final 半額 sticker that I try to aim for (unsuccessfully in some instances). Also interestingly for me as a new Japanese learner, 引 means pull, so it’s basically saying X-円 or X%-割 off.

One food I really loved in Japanese supermarkets is the sashimi and how fresh yet cheap it was.

For example, tuna sashimi (known locally as maguro/マグロ) goes for about 4 SGD for 5 slices at non-discounted prices, it’s 2 SGD after the maximum 50% discount at 9-10PM. The fatty variant (about 15 SGD in Singapore) goes for 8 SGD in Japan at non-discounted prices.

My theory is that supermarkets want to finish everything within the day, so all sashimi comes from fish delivered on the same-day morning. With izakayas and sushi places, you never know how long they’ve been keeping the fish.

🍶 Izakayas (居酒屋 [い·ざか·や])

Our Izakaya journey started one night in Kobe when we were cold and hungry.

We hadn’t found the confidence to step into an izakaya up till then, and it was the cold and hunger of that evening together with seeing a highly reviewed izakaya in front of us that convinced us we had all the necessary skills to deal with izakayas and their entirely Japanese-based menus.

Through observation, we learnt how to blend in with the chaotic mix of salarymen partaking in nomikais, friends catching up after work, couples on date night, and solo diners:

1. First, a drink — it’s customary to order a drink once you take a seat. I’m still not sure if soft drinks are permitted but alcohol here is cheap compared to Singapore so I always got my coke highball (コーク/コーラ-ハイボール ).

2. Order starters/appetisers — Most/all izakayas have some raw-fish or cold dishes which are typically the starters. I always went with tuna sashimi AKA maguro/マグロ.

3. Order mains — These are usually the fried/grilled food. Think chicken karaage, fried tofu, and different types of pork and beef dishes.

4. Finish up with rice/dessert — There’s usually plain rice for 150 yen available and also chocolate cake or cheesecake that you can order to finish off the meal.

Izakayas also come with both standing (counter) and seated places. We found that some izakayas had offers/discounts only for standing spots and in general, standing izakayas were cheaper than izakayas where you could sit and chill.

Payment for the really local izakayas are usually cash-only.

🍱 Ekibens (駅弁 [えき·べん])

If you’re fortunate enough to ride the shinkansen (Japan’s high-speed train lines), there are stores specialised in bento boxes that are meant for eating on the train.

These are known as ekiben shops selling bento boxes (ekibens) which are prepared to be eaten as-is without heating. There are also self-heating bento boxes if you really want your food hot, but for the majority of bento boxes on sale at these places, they’re meant to be eaten at room temperature.

Honestly, I found nothing extremely special about the food but having a bento box paired with a Japanese beer while speeding along at 300km/h through the countrysides of Japan is an experience I really enjoyed.

🍡 Ordering food

Since we travelled with the intent of trying to catch glimpses into life as a local, we tried everything from small family-run restaurants all the way to big globalised chain stalls.

Here’s all the ways we’ve found that food ordering happens from the easiest-for-foreigners to the hardest:

🎟 Ticket machines

Some food outlets in Japan use a machine to take orders. They’re mainly found at ramen shops but you will also see these at chain stalls of any kind.

With these machines, do not queue first. You order via the machine, collect your tickets, and then you join the queue. In most cases, when you’re 2nd/3rd in line, the staff will come out to check your tickets and collect them from you to start preparing your order.

Many of these don’t have english menus but you can open your Google Translate app in camera mode to see what each item means.

Pro-tip: Use your coins here if you don’t want to be tempted to use your coins at capsule machines.

📱 iPads

Some global chains like Sushiro already have this in other countries. One place that has this as an ordering mechanism only in Japan is Yoshinoya. These are the easiest ways to order since the software usually supports English as an alternative

🌐 Reservations on Tabelog

If you’re heading to a place that’s very popular with locals, there’s a high chance you’ll need a reservation on Tabelog:

https://tabelog.com/en/

Tabelog will offer you an english/tourist version of the menu but note that the prices will be higher. If you’ve done your homework and learnt a bit of Japanese, go for the Japanese menu.

Most reservations will request for you to pre-order a set. 10% of that set’s price will be used as the reservation fee.

One day before the reservation, you might also need to confirm it via email. The awesome thing about Tabelog is they don’t need an account, just a credit card to pay the reservation fee.

🗣 Verbal ordering

This sounds difficult in theory, but in reality, you’ll have a menu that you can translate with Google Translate on your own time. When you’re ready, you just say loudly “すみません (sumimasen)“, and point at the items you want and say “これをひとつください (kore o hitotsu kudasai)” (one of this please), join it with “と (to)” (and), and order the next item.

Other numbers to use are:

1. 一つ (ひとつ) — hitotsu — one of this

2. 二つ (ふたつ) — futatsu — two of this

3. 三つ (みっつ) — mittsu — three of this

4. 四つ (よっつ) — yottsu — four of this

5. 五つ (いつつ) — itsutsu — five of this

If you’re anxious about six and above, do yourself a favour and learn Japanese. Duolingo truly makes it very easy to acquire basic conversation skills.

✍️ Order sheets

The most difficult IMO. You might have to write Kanji and if you don’t have any experience in Chinese/Japanese, this will be hell.

Experienced this mainly at busy standing izakayas.

👟 Getting around

Transportation in Japan is mainly based on public transport. If you’re looking to visit rural areas, you’ll need a car; but for everyday touristing, a SUICA/ICOCA card is all you will need.

🚌 Local buses

In Japan, you get on the bus from the middle-door and exit from the front-door. This is because there exists some flat-rate buses where you pay a flat-rate; these are known as City Buses and can be found all over Osaka and Kyoto. YMMV in Tokyo.

Buses follow a similar schedule strictness as trains. If a bus is scheduled for 4:00, they might arrive at 3:55 but not open the entry doors until 3:59. The time on the schedule is when they’re supposed to arrive. I found this really nice as compared to Singapore where bus schedules are defined by waiting times instead of exact times.

🚇 Local trains

The local trains can get confusing fast because of how many variants there are. There’s the standard local train, the express limited, and the rapid express train.

It’s important to know which will get you to your intended station and typically Google Maps has all the information although it could be presented in a better way.

• Local trains (普通列車 [ふつうれっしゃ]) stop at every station

• Rapid trains (快速電車 [かいそくでんしゃ]) skip some stations

• Express trains (急行列車 [きゅうこうれっしゃ]) stops at every station within a specific region, but skips all other stations outside of that region

• Limited Express trains (特急列車 [とっきゅうれっしゃ]) skip majority of stations and stops only at designated stations

Being at the correct platform that Google Maps tells you to be at is usually not enough. When you’re in doubt, you can also ask the train conductor (stand at the first car and show your Google Maps to the driver when they arrive).

For most platforms, they come in pairs that go in opposite directions; eg 1/2 are pairs of trains that go the opposite direction, so are 3/4 and 5/6. The only difference you’ll have to take note is which category of train (eg. Local/Rapid/Express/etc) the next train is and whether that category stops at your intended stop.

🚅 Shinkansen

If you’re travelling across major cities without flying, you’ll likely have to take the bullet train known as the shinkansen / 新幹線 (しんかんせん).

The easiest and most hassle-free way is to book the ticket online here:

https://smart-ex.jp/en/index.php

There are reserved and unreserved seats. Reserved seats are generally in the later cars and you’re assured of a seat. Unreserved seats are as described — you get on an hope there’s a seat in the car. Moving between different cars of the same class are permitted.

There’s also the Green Cars which offer more legspace if you need it; and if you’re carrying a huge luggage, you can/should reserve the last seat in the car which means the space for oversized luggages just behind that seat comes with the seat.

We reserved the oversized baggage seats but ended up not needing it because there’s also overhead storage which comfortably fits a 60L backpack and even 24-inch luggages. 26-inch luggages might be the maximum but we didn’t try it.

And finally, if you want to lock your luggage, there’s also an add-on to allow you to do that. Those lockers are situated between cars and the password is set to a mix of your seat and booking number. In the booking site, these are labelled as “Oversized Baggage Compartment” instead of “Oversized Baggage Area”.

🧻 Toilets

Some say what they miss the most are the toilets in Japan.

I’m not that crazy about them but I gotta admit, the experience of toilets in Japan is something else. As it is in Singapore, toilets are everywhere and are generally clean (I guess if you’re from Europe/USA, this is somewhat unheard of and you usually have to pay for toilets in some way or another)

What’s different from Singapore is how clean the toilets are, even in crowded and touristy places. The dirtiest toilet I came across there was in a hyper-touristy place (Meiji Jinggu in Tokyo) and even that was cleaner than the average train toilet in Singapore.

The really nice thing about Japanese toilets is how the automated system attached to it even warms the seat for you. This is especially nice when it’s cold outside you lay your bum onto the warm seat.

The downside of such high technology when it comes to toilets is how temporary toilets (especially in hotel rooms) feel. If you’re like me and haven’t been to Japan, the structure of the hotel toilet will feel like one of those public makeshift toilets — walls are hollow to the knock and they’re usually slightly higher/lower than the room’s floor.

The reason behind this as I found out, was that toilet systems are made modular in Japan due to their need for electricity. This means they basically pre-fabricate entire toilets according to dimension specifications, slot it into the space, and turn on the power & water.

👜 Shopping

👕 Secondhand Stores/Flea Markets

Secondhand stores and flea markets in Japan — unlike the rest of the countries I’ve been to — are worth giving a shot.

My proudest purchase on my trip was a Polo Ralph Lauren jacket from a secondhand store that I got for 50 SGD which costs 1200 SGD new. The wife’s happiest shopping moment was at the monthly Kobo-ichi festival at Toji Temple in Kyoto.

With major secondhand store chains, we found that it was quite hit-or-miss depending on the stock and it wasn’t as cheap as Instagram/TikTok tried to claim it was. Expect to pay anywhere from 50-300 SGD for things that cost >1k SGD — it’s relatively cheap but it’s still not absolutely cheap.

Flea markets are a different game because you can’t plan for them. They appear on dates known mainly to locals (you’ll need to do some research) but they’re legitimiately cheap places to get things like souvenirs and clothes.

For example at the Kobo-ichi flea market we attended, haoris/yukatas/kimonos go for ~30-50 SGD for a good quality secondhand kimono, ~5-10 SGD for average quality ones, and we got hand-made goods like bags, tissue pouches, coin pouches et cetera. Flea markets also tend to come with food by street stall vendors which are much tastier albeit probably not as healthy.

👘 Kimonos/Yukatas/Haoris

I regret not learning more about these before I met my first yukata in Kyoto.

• Kimonos — mainly ceremonial and/or uniforms in places selling the Japanese culture; as a person I didn’t care much for these. They’re thick, hot, and not applicable for my culture or lifestyle

• Yukatas — mainly for indoor wear; I got interested in these after wearing a yukata-inspired set of hotel room-wear. They’re actually comfortable for sleeping in and serve as a blanket as well

• Haoris — these are the shorter coats that you typically see people in Japanese-themed places wear. They’re much more versatile and I’ve see people wear them in casual street fashion

These are generally expensive in the main cities but if you know where to go (sorry, we don’t, we only saw the shop at Toji Temple’s Kobo-ichi Festival), brand new base-quality yukatas are sold at 5 SGD per piece and decent quality second-hand haoris go for 20-40 SGD. In city areas, these start from 50 SGD generally.

💸 Commercial brands/goods

Some Japanese brands/goods stand out more than others. The important thing to look out for is always the “Made-in-Japan” label. If it’s not made-in-Japan, it’s likely the store is the kind that imports from China and sells the goods mainly to tourists; (because apparently Japanese people avoid “Made-in-China” stuff like the plague)

Some brands and types of goods we were looking out/looked out for:

1. Kitchenware — extremely susceptible to “Made-in-China, sold-by-Japanese”. We found majority of stores doing this but the few that weren’t had super impressive wares that made us overload our luggages. Think genuinely high-quality charcoal chopsticks and unique handmade ceramic bowls

2. Leatherware — another category of goods that’s susceptible to the “Made-in-China” pandemic. Ultimately we couldn’t find many “Made-in-Japan” goods that were also within our budget and ended up not getting any. Generally the Japanese handmade leatherware goes for upwards of 200 SGD for a wallet, and upwards of 500 SGD for bags. It’s probably worth it, but I rarely carry my wallet around in Singapore and the wife and I are also full-time WFH people. Couldn’t find any motivation to get a stylish, well-made bag.

3. GU/Uniqlo — if you’ve done a little research, you’d already know GU is the cheaper sister company of Uniqlo. After visiting Japan, I can assure you they sell exactly the same thing. GU has prototype versions of Uniqlo’s products and in general is about 10-20% cheaper than Uniqlo which is itself 10-20% cheaper than the rest of the world. For example, the famous (in Singapore) oversized t-shirt goes for 11 SGD at GU, and I got clothes from Uniqlo’s linen range for 20+ SGD compared to 40+ SGD in Singapore.

4. The North Face (TNF) — it was only in Japan that I learnt TNF in Japan is more-or-less self-governed and has jurisdiction over their own designs. If you’re looking for Japan-specific goods from them, they’re available via a “Purple Label” branding. Bags from TNF in Japan are also of different designs than those sold in the rest of Asia. We ended up getting the Base Camp Fuse Box II which we saw a lot in Osaka and found it super spacious/useful for future travels

5. Mont Bell — before Japan, I adored Patagonia’s products. After Japan, I’m all about Mont Bell. Mont Bell was founded in Osaka in 1975 and the quality of their apparel is equivalent to Patagonia/TNF, at half-to-a-third of the price. Their unique Wicktron material dries so quick that it’s roughly wearable straight out of a washing machine without drying. If you’re visiting, every city’s flagship Mont Bell store also has a unique store-design t-shirt (in Osaka, this was Tennoji Station, in Kyoto, this was at Kyoto Station)

6. Spingle — one shoe brand I went to Japan intending to get was this because of the handmade process and also resulting quality and durability. They’re not the only ones doing handmade shoes using vulcanised (via ka-ryu) rubber — there’s also Shoes Like Pottery — but they were definitely the most accessible and looked the best. In Singapore, a pair of these would set you back 300+ SGD. I got mine for 200 SGD from a department stall in Namba, Osaka. The amazing thing is all their shoes are hand-made in Japan, yes, even those selling in Singapore.

👁‍🗨 Observation Decks (展望台 [てん·ぼう·だい])

There are two types of observation decks you can find in Japan. There’s obviously the man-made ones where you take a fancy elevator up to the top of a fancy building, and the other type is usually found at temples/shrines on mountainsides.

For the observatory decks in the mountainside, these are typically harder to get to unless you’ve rented a car or are willing to hike for a bit. IMO the view from these trumps the man-made ones especially so since there’s no glass window and tourists are less likely to overcrowd those areas given the difficulty of getting there.

For man-made ones, these are typically found in the highest buildings and you’ll have to pay a fee for entry for many of them. Most are available for booking via Klook and your mileage will vary across different observatory decks — some are awful (toursity and overcrowded), some are beautiful. Also if you’re a cheapo and don’t want ot pay, ask ChatGPT for free alternatives around your area and you might be pleasantly surprised at some of the suggestions.

Most man-made observation decks also have a phototaking service where they’ll give you a black-and-white copy for free and ask if you’d like to purchase a bigger copy.

From what I’ve observed too, man-made observation decks seem to play a part in local culture by being a place that couples/people who are dating go to. In every single man-made observation deck, there’s always heart-shaped decorations for people to take pictures with.

🈺 Goshuin (御朱印 [ご·しゅ·いん]) Collecting

Temples and shrines are a big part of everyday life for Japan’s inhabitants. If you’ve watched enough anime, you’ll have definitely come across characters going to pray at shrines before important events. The same holds true in reality.

If you walk the backstreets of cities, you’ll often find small shrines and temples scattered around the city where people stop to pray as they pass along the street. Even in Tokyo with it’s towering skyscrapers, we found shrines nestled in between buildings.

In the bigger shrines and temples, one thing that’s made available for everyone is goshuins.

To the Japanese, these are stamps/seals that prove they’ve visited a temple/shrine. Collecting these are akin to collecting virtues and the books which these are collected in — known as goshuincho — are often buried with the person when they die and are believed to help the collector prove to the deities they meet in the afterlife that they’ve led a dedicated life.

For me as a foreign traveller though, these goshuins are a nice way to remember which temples and shrines I’ve been to. I’ve always found souvenirs uselessly expensive.

If you’re intent on collecting goshuins, remember that the goshuincho is a book that is considered sacred by believers. IE do not use the book for any other purpose than goshuins which are different from the free stamps you can collect around Japan.

Also something to note is to keep a separate goshuincho for Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. I didn’t experience it myself but I’ve read that Shinto shrines may refuse you a goshuin if they see a goshuin from a Buddhist temple in it, and vice versa.

The most unique goshuin experience I’ve had was a temple in the Takanawa area in Tokyo. This was the Sengaku-ji Temple dedicated to the 47 ronins. Being granted a goshuin there wasn’t about money (it was donations based and technically free, but please donate if you’re getting one there) but you had to copy a Buddhist sutra which resulted in me having my first calligraphy experience.

♨️ Public baths

There’s nothing like standing in line with tens of naked people waiting for your turn to bathe yourself. And I’m not saying that with any form of sacarsm. I was initially skeptical of using a sento but after trying it once, the experience is definitely something I’d recommend to anyone.

Coming from a relatively-westernised country like Singapore, bathing was always a private behind-closed-doors affair.

Physical nakedness is generally seen as something to be hidden, something to be embarrassed about. Raw, naked, candid thoughts and opinions on the contrary are celebrated. In Japan, the reverse seems to be true. Physical nakedness is nothing to be ashamed about, but raw opinions are frowned upon.

We came across three types of public baths in Japan:

1. Sentos (銭湯 [せん·とう]) — apparently simple public baths (we didn’t go for this one)

2. Super-sentos — big public baths with a cafe attached (better experience I suppose?)

3. Onsens (温泉 [おん·せん]) — the differentiating factor is the hot spring water used here

4. Rokans — a hotel built around the onsen experience

In general, all three types of baths operate with the same process:

1. Get a locker of some kind (super-sentos may have more than one type of locker)

2. Rent towels if you didn’t bring your own — there’s usually one big one for your body (for normal baths) and one small one for wipe-downs (if you’re going into the pool)

3. Use locker to store your clothes/shoes

4. Bring towel into bathing area with you

5. Wait in line for the seated bathing area if that’s your aim

6. Take a quick shower at the overhead showers if your only aim is the pool

7. Get into the hot pool first, slowly; splash some of the hot water onto your body, get in legs first and get used to the heat before submerging more of yourself into the pool

8. Get into the cold pool after you’ve had enough of the hot pool; same process, do it slowly

9. Get out, wipe yourself dry, get changed, and enjoy the cafe if you’re at a super-sento. I recommend fresh milk

Can’t really take pictures in sentos for obvious reasons so here’s one from Google:

Onsens look similar, but you’d typically have wood/stone pools with a darker overall theme. Since they’re also using hot spring water, they tend to be outdoors where you might have an actual view of Mt Fuji instead of a picture of Mt Fuji:

Some onsens will also have private onsen experiences where if you’re travelling with a partner of the opposite sex, you can both get into the same pool. Generally these are smaller and look more like a big bath tub:

For ryokans, ryokans are a different beast altogether. Think of them as accommodations built around letting you have onsens 24/7. These typically come with a set of private baths that don’t discriminate between genders, a full public onsen area, and even in-room tubs linked directly to the hot spring water source. You’ll also get free snacks and booze throughout the day.

At the ryokan we were at, there was free milk served from 6-10 AM, free ice cream served from 1-5 PM, free ramen served from 10-10:30 PM, and a round-the-clock free bar which served soft drinks, whiskies, sakes, and highballs including the infamous strong zero.

🧳 Luggage Transfer Services

Luggage delivery services shouldn’t be new to you if you’ve been on social media. They sometimes get a bad rep but throughout our Japan trip (mind you it was during Golden Week) we didn’t face any issues with the delivery/transportation of our luggages.

We didn’t intend to use these services but ended up doing so after seeing how crowded the trains were.

An additional benefit we found of using these services was that they could serve as luggage storage. Not an intended usage for sure, but it helps that while we went off to Hakone, Yamoto Transport was doing a slow delivery of our luggages to Yokohama.

It also helped on our last hotel transition that we could get another company, AirPorter, to take our luggages, store it for 2 nights, and deliver it to us at the airport at our check-in time.

🏨 Ta-Q-Bin

Ta-Q-Bins are how you can take overcrowded Japanese trains in peace without worrying about occupying too much space and disturbing locals’ train journeys. This is especially important if you’re travelling during popular tourist periods or if your luggage is especially big.

The main company operating Ta-Q-Bins is Yamoto Transport and here’s an example of what the luggage order form looks like:

I’m proud to say that during this trip, we figured out how to fill up everything ourselves because we made a bad life decision of sending our luggage at 12 AM. As we found out, hotel staff manning the front desk during after-hours aren’t familiar with these processes.

We ended up helping the staff with filling out the form based on how our previous form was filled up and less the kanji, we can now fill it up ourselves.

So, the process is:

1. Request for Ta-Q-Bin from the hotel staff. Most hotels have pre-printed luggage tags where you only have to fill up the size category, contact information, and destination.

2. Ideally (but not 100% required), the hotel staff will help you call the receiving hotel to confirm that they will accept the delivery — most hotels do.

3. Fill up the destination and postal code

4. Put the name listed in your destination hotel’s reservation as the recipient.

5. The luggage dimensions will then be measured. These go by size + weight. My luggage was in the 140cm category (20kg weight limit), my wife’s was in the 160cm category (25kg weight limit). The category is measured by adding the width, length, and depth and each category has it’s own weight limit.

6. Pay the hotel — this is usually done via cash but some hotels accept card.

🛩 AirPorter

The AirPorter service only does luggage transfers from hotels to airports. The application form is online and you’ll have to do this yourself — don’t worry, the website is in English.

Link to AirPorter’s website: https://airporter.co.jp/en/

If you managed to make bad life decisions like we did and have to somehow switch hotels just before your flight, AirPorter allows holding of your luggage for a few days before delivering it to the airport of your choice in areas it’s operational in.

The process:

1. Ensure your hotel supports AirPorter — there will be a brochure/stand if they do, I suspect not all hotels have this, but all hotels we stayed at at least supported this

2. Sign up with AirPorter

3. Submit a luggage transfer request indiciating your hotel

4. Indicate how many days you’d like them to hold the luggage for

5. Confirm your luggage sizes

6. Make payment

7. Show the hotel your booking confirmation and they’ll handle the rest

じゃあまた

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably interested in travelling to Japan and I hope you have a meaningful trip of your own!

Till the next time I find inspiration to write-

I’m sad. I didn’t wake up in Japan to aircon-like coolness and unpredictable weather for the day that would make me open my weather app almost immediately.

But it’s daijobu, lots of chances in the future I suppose.

In the meantime, here’s some reflections and thoughts of the 24-day trip I just had. It’s also my first time in Japan and frankly I’m mindblown by how I had never ended up choosing Japan as a travel destination in the past 30+ years of my life.

This post was originally much longer but I decided to split it up so that this post covers the trip itself. You can find the second part that focuses on experiences I found unique and interesting in Japan here:

1. 📚 Before the trip…

   1. 🗺 Locations & Dates

   2. 🀄️ Language

   3. 💫 Activities

2. 📍 Places we went

   1. 🌇 Osaka

   2. ⛩ Kyoto

   3. 🗻 Hakone

   4. 🧱 Yokohama

   5. 🏙 Tokyo

3. ✨ Things I’d do in retrospect

📚 Before the trip…

Planning started around 4-5 months before our intended travel date. We had just finished our wedding and settled into our new home, and a honeymoon trip was due.

Like every couple from Singapore, Europe obviously came into the conversation; but the wife doesn’t like bread in general, I’ve already spent time in Europe and US, and I had never been to Japan before.

Japan it was.

🗺 Locations & Dates

Since I’m new to Japan, what better a journey to travel than the obvious golden triangle (Tokyo <> Kyoto <> Osaka)?

1. 7 days in Osaka (+ day trip to Kobe)

2. 5 days in Kyoto (+ day trip to Uji)

3. 2 days in Hakone

4. 2 days in Yokohama

5. 7 days in Tokyo

Japan experts out there, please don’t cringe, it’s my first visit to Japan and I’m gonna bask in all my tourist-glory while it lasts.

We planned our trip for mid-April to early May, completely oblivious to the concept of the Golden Week holidays. We also thought we knew Sakura would be around that period and hoped to see it, but it wasn’t, it was even earlier in April for the Kansai region (Osaka/Kyoto).

One thing we didn’t expect was the huge bump in hotel prices across seasons. When I was casually looking at Japan last year around the summer period, prices were up to a third of the prices we paid.

TL;DR avoid spring/autumn if you’re on a budget, or like, book really really early, like 7-8 months in advance. Some hotels were even sold out by November for bookings in April (spring). We made a mistake of booking the plane tickets first before researching, so we didn’t really have a choice but to continue with the time period of missing Sakura + being in Japan during Golden Week.

🀄️ Language

As a traveler, I like to experience things that give me a peek into what local life is like and try out things which fascinate even locals. The problem was, Japan is a Japanese-speaking/writing country, if it wasn’t obvious enough.

So I also began on Duolingo lessons.

Got up to Section 3 (out of 5 — which would have put me at a JLPT N5 level) and in retrospect, learning some Japanese especially the Hiragana and Katakana writing systems was a really good decision.

Being able to read signs and menus helped me to navigate Japan more easily; being able to say things beyond hello/excuse me/thank you/bye also lubricated interactions at non-touristy local places.

For anyone travelling to Japan wanting to experience Japan more intimately, I highly recommend finishing at least up to Section 2 in Duolingo where you’d have completed the basic Hiragana/Katakana lessons.

You won’t be able to converse at any meaningful level for sure, but you’ll be able to read train station signs, menus, and roughly get the gist of what service people are saying to you. More importantly, for me at least, it gave me the confidence to do/try things I wouldn’t have dared to had I not been able to read Japanese at some level.

💫 Activities

Being new to Japan, I didn’t have anything to go by other than Instagram and TikTok influencers.

We mainly wanted to:

1. Eat foods like how locals do

2. Buy quality Made-in-Japan stuff

3. Take awesome photographs

4. Climb at Japanese bouldering gyms

5. Try a public onsen (the wife at least)

Planning was done around this. We only had to book one restaurant for Kobe beef on Tabelog, and the rest were booked via Klook which somehow offers a lower price in our local SGD than going via the official site which requires payment in yen.

One regret I had was taking for granted that most activities could be booked within a month’s notice. Turns out that high-demand experiences are booked 3-4 months in advance and could involve lotteries that you might not even win (eg. Nintendo Museum and Yamazaki Distillery in Kyoto).

📍 Places we went

🌇 Osaka

Notable places/activities:

1. Hotel Hanshin Annex — hotel we stayed at in near Fukushima station, full of hidden izakayas and good food; service at this hotel was excellent as well. Free laundry machines (three) albeit needing to queue and wait with others

2. Fukushima neighbour for truly local food — we dined at breakfast soba stalls with only locals, stalls with “No English” signs, izakayas with fully Japanese menus, and of course chain stores like Yoshinoya

3. Umeda Sky Building — decent view of the city but avoid if you dislike super touristy places, there’s better observation decks

4. Osaka Castle & Museum — a Europe-standard museum that also has the cheapest kimono experience you’ll find in the region (10 SGD/pax for 45 minutes albeit in a museum)

5. Steak Iwasaki (Kobe day trip) — a humble but beautiful restaurant serving high quality Kobe beef with show cooking. Not cheap but definitely worth it to experience, once probably

6. Nunobiki Herb Garden (Kobe day trip) — a botanical garden in Kobe featuring herbs and their uses in daily life; the ropeway also offers fantastic views over Kobe city

7. TeamLabs Botanical Garden — Nagai Botanical Gardens transforms into an art exhibition at night courtesy of TeamLabs

8. Osaka Castle — interesting history about Osaka and how it was central to Japan’s development

9. Nambasennichimae — market street featuring Made-in-Japan kitchenware; after travelling to the other parts of Japan’s golden triangle, this street sold wares at the cheapest prices we came across.

10. Abeno Harukas 300 — probably the best observation deck in Osaka, it’s higher than Umeda Sky, is less crowded, and has a decent place to sit, chill, and eat

11. Dotonbori — of course we had to visit this iconic street; nothing much here except for the sights and sounds of how busy Osaka can get

12. D-Bouldering Namba — for climbing, it turned out to be a really nice and huge gym

We landed on our first day in Japan at Osaka’s Kansai Airport at around 10pm.

We didn’t trust ourselves to get past immigration and choose the right train so we chose to stay at the hotel airport. Over the next week, we explored Osaka and in retrospect, Osaka was the city I personally loved the most during this trip:

1. Delicious food at affordable prices — We were initially wary of the food places around our hotel — y’know, hotels + touristy and stuff — but as we eventually found out a bit too late, Fukushima neighbourhood was the food hub for even locals. It’s only one stop away from Osaka station and we had our doubts about it’s popularity amongst locals, but the Google reviews didn’t lie (eg. “Delicious”, “Food was lovely” — 2 stars in true Japanese fashion). We we were wondering how we always got so lucky with great tasting food until we realised the baseline quality here is already high.

2. Prices were lower at malls/stores — We didn’t feel it when we were in Osaka, but things sold here were the least-touristy, and prices, the lowest, we’d see for the rest of the trip. Like all the major cities, every major Japanese/global brand was here (at Dotonbori/Namda/Umeda) and in general, shops had less people even though they already seemed crowded to us at that point in time.

3. People here felt more real — This was transparent to us at first but as we traveled eastwards across Japan, we realised we took the (relatively) unpretentious Osaka experience for granted. When people here were nice, they felt genuinely nice, when they weren’t, you’d know it. Ironically, Osaka was the city where we saw the most “No-English” signs, yet had the nicest people inside although they didn’t always open up at first. Most store owners were cold (IMO shy, probably?) at first, but they became friendly once we attempted conversation in Japanese. Most “No-English” places even attempted to communicate back to us in English when we tried communicating in Japanese. Cute. There’s some people saying Japanese are two-faced, I felt a tinge of that in Tokyo, but not so much in Osaka.

4. Much more local life/culture around — There was literally a pre-school, primary school, and secondary school surrounding our hotel. I personally loved being able to watch how the locals lived, albeit from behind a window (both literally and figuratively). From the 会社員 (office workers) husbands having their nomikais at izakayas, to wives picking up kids from the pre-school, to frustrated-looking salarymen sitting on park benches staring into space, to grandmas going grocery shopping, to school-going adolescents walking/cycling to school. Yes, we saw all of that through a window at our hotel because there was a local park/playground just next to it.

A short 7 days later, we packed and headed northwards to the place of temples and shrines…

⛩ Kyoto

Notable places/activities:

1. OMO3 by Hoshino Resorts — hotel we stayed at; rooms have a slight herb/spice fragrance that may not suit everyone. Service was excellent as well but afterhours staff were part-timers which isn’t great if you’re submitting your luggage for delivery the night before travelling

2. Nidec Kyoto Tower — decent observation deck that also sways slightly; fairly touristy but it’s also really the highest man-made point in Kyoto city despite it not being very high

3. Nishiki Ramen — show cooking with unique matcha ramen; loved the unique broth that’s made with seabream and enhanced with yuzu/matcha (yes, matcha)

4. Shogunzaka Seiryuden — A mountain-side temple behind Chionin temple with an amazing observation deck and an open worship hall that has a uniquely sacred silence. Very quiet environment

5. Kodai-ji Temple — park is a scam IMO, no history involved, bamboo forest is a selling point but small as hell, also overcrowded

6. Sannenzaka — the touristy area of Kyoto where you can also get your postcard shot of Yasaka Pagoda; avoid if you dislike touristy/crowded places

7. Nishiki Market — a ghost of it’s former glory with overpriced food that also isn’t freshly cooked, give this a miss probably

8. Toji Temple Kobo-ichi — on the 21st of every month, this temple has a super-awesome flea market commemorating how trade used to be done in this area; prices are local and food is mindblowing; we spent more than half a day here

9. Fushimi Inari Shrine — the famous shrine with a thousand Tori gates. Despite being touristy, this is still worth a go; the experience of walking through the Tori gates is even more amazing than it looks

10. Tsujirihei Honten (Uji day trip) — high quality matcha in a quaint and quiet neighbourhood. Slightly hard to find but no tourists

11. Byodo-in Temple (Uji day trip) — majestic temple where I first found out about goshuins

12. Uji River (Uji day trip) — picturesque river with traditional houses in the background

13. Liquor Museum — a liqour bar attached to a FamilyMart; you can bring in food from FamilyMart and pair it with unique liqour like limited edition Hibikis and Yamazakis. They even seer the food for you

14. D-Bouldering Matsuiyamate — really nice bouldering gym south of Kyoto nestled in a local neighbourhood

Kyoto worked as expected, temples and shrines galore. But there was also more to Kyoto than just that. Unlike Osaka, Kyoto felt more village-y with its small shops and eateries. Noticed many more elderly folks as well as less office workers.

Temples and shrines in this region were definitely a league above those in other places with massive gardens and no buildings in sight (Kyoto is largely a low-rise area). In Tokyo, temples and shrines tend to be surrounded by towering skyscrapers, which has it’s own charm, but I preferred the serenity of the ones in Kyoto.

As expected as well based on Instagram/TikTok, the tourist area of Kyoto (Sannenzaka) were overcrowded and unpleasant to go to and it was there that I felt the most hostility towards foreigners.

There were way more signs indicating “No Photos” and “No Entry” than in any other part of Japan we went. Though I’d say it’s not unjustified given the behaviour of western and Chinese tourists there. I’d be annoyed as well.

If I could give a recommendation, it would be explore outside of the touristy areas. Kyoto’s really nice and quiet at the city fringes as we explored on our last day there while on the way to the D-Bouldering Matsuiyamate bouldering gym. Seems also like families in this region are more well-to-do (or it could be the cost of living outside the city was lower than say in Osaka).

After another short 6 days in Kyoto, we left on the shinkansen to the mountains…

🗻 Hakone

Hotel: Suiun Goro

Notable places/activities:

• Suiun — it’s the ryokan we stayed at and an experience in itself; entire hotel is barefoot, there’s both private and public onsen areas, and food and beer is served round-the-clock; for free. All rooms also came with a cypress tub with a hot spring water tap. Felt like I could spend an entire 2-3 days just relaxing within the ryokan itself.

• Goro Ropeway — a ropeway that brings you from Sounzan station (top of Goro) to to Lake Ashi via Owakudani Valley Sulphur Springs. You can also catch beautiful views of Mt Fuji on a clear day

• Owakudani Valley Sulphur Springs — a huge sulphur spring where they cook black eggs that’s said to extend your life by a few years by eating them

• Lake Ashi — a self-contained lake that you can take a pirate ship across

Until a year ago I hadn’t heard of this region. Thanks to a colleague who went to live in Japan for a year, I found out about Hakone and its charms.

Hakone turned out to be really really village-y albeit in a touristy way; not touristy enough for me to diss this place tho, it was just the right amount of touristy especially for a town that exists because of tourism.

Think a resort island where most of the population will be tourists both domestic and international. It’s fundamentally a village of ryokans with the surrounding restaurants and shops only serving to provide what ryokans don’t provide.

Personally I loved Hakone because of how close to nature it let me feel. There were no buildings higher than 3-4 storeys and the entire town was built along a mountain face. This made walking to the ryokan lk hellish but it was also part of the charm of this place; one side looked up at the mountains, the other offered a view of other mountain ranges.

The ropeway from Goro to Lake Aashi was also an intense one and gives amazing views of Mt Fuji when the sky is clear. We got lucky and on the only day we were there, Mt Fuji revealed it’s full form to us from the carpark at Owakudani Valley Sulphur Springs behind the souvenir shop there that sells the black eggs.

🧱 Yokohama

Notable places/activities:

• Oakwood Suites & Residences — the hotel we stayed at; hotel’s check-in is on the 46th floor which also serves as a free observation deck for the public

• Yokohama Chinatown — a well-known Chinatown, the chicken cutlet here is almost at the same level as (or even surpasses a little) the ones in Taiwan’s night markets.

• Yokohama World Porters — massive shopping mall containing a mix of goods for almost any demographic. Also has a decent food court on the ground level

• SPINNS Vintage — a secondhand store inside the World Porters mall with interesting items, got a Polo Ralph Lauren jacket worth 1.2k SGD new for 50 SGD; it was in good condition as well but served previously as a rental jacket (there are numbers on the inner pocket’s flap — but seriously, so what?)

• Cup Noodle Museum — an aesthetic museum about the origins of Cup Noodles; not the original birthplace of instant noodles but a better museum experience than the one in Osaka according to reviews. You get to design your own cup of Cup Noodles and there’s even a ramen making experience if you’re willing to spend 1.5 hours doing that there.

• Red Brick Warehouse — repurposed warehouse with mainly (slightly overpriced) artisan goods; worth a walk-through if you’re looking for souvenirs

• Bungo Stray Dogs pilgrimage — Bungo Stray Dogs is an anime based in Yokohama; many places you’ll pass by were featured in the anime

After Hakone, Yokohama felt like a culture shock in a “back to big city life” way.

Yokohama felt a lot closer to what Singapore is like than even Tokyo did. Most trains ran underground here, there were people who spoke English fluently, there were atas supermarkets selling higher-end goods, there was a commercialised bay area that reminded me of Esplanade, and there were buildings with European architecture — not unlike Singapore’s downtown area.

Based on a 2-night stay which I’m 100% sure is too short to even generalise a city, Yokohama felt culturally dry compared to the other parts of Japan we’ve been to. There didn’t seem to be clear/strong identities and I suspect it’s got to do with it being a port city where it was mainly business transactions that drove growth in this area.

Would probably come back but only for a day trip instead of an overnight stay.

Fun fact: Yokohama is where the climbing brand PER-ADRA which makes climbing shoes specifically for Asian feet is located. There’s only one outlet in the whole of Japan and we got to meet the lovely founder while we were there. She even gave us free socks because we purchased a shoe there :D sadly, the gym was too expensive for us to climb at.

🏙 Tokyo

Hotels: Tosei Cocone & Miyako City

Notable places/activities:

• Tosei Hotel Cocone Kanda — first hotel we stayed at and it’s a stereotypical Japanese shoebox hotel room; the wife got depressed on moving in but we found it pretty cozy after 4 nights here. Service was as Japanese as it could possibly be — smiles and good service as long as you follow “happy path” behaviour; things wasn’t so good once we had a custom request :/

• Miyako City Takanawa — second hotel we stayed at because Tosei Cocone was overbooked during Golden Week; this hotel was crazy good for the price in terms of service, location, and room. TBF, Takanawa is a newly developing area so prices will probably go up in the near future. Hotel staff were fluent in English — something that wasn’t common in Tokyo apparently — and there’s free snacks from 5:30PM to 10:00PM.

• Tokyo Character Street — an underground mall full of anime characters; my wallet was thankful that nothing was very attractive for me even though all my favourite anime were featured

• Shinjuku Gyoen — a huge and beautiful garden in the Shinjuku area that’s better than the park at Meiji Jinggu (IMO)

• Akihabara Milk Shop — you actually have to tap-in to the train station to access this; milk is fresh and after you’re done, you leave the bottle with the store for them to refill with fresh milk again the next day

• Kanda Myoujin Shrine — a relatively high-tech shrine; think robot fortune telling machines with a robot lion doing a dance before dispensing your fortune, and amulet vending machines

• Senso-ji Temple — almost turned away once I saw the crowd; stayed only to get the goshuin which was literally a production line — you can’t see the person granting you your goshuin, you pay, get a queue ticket, and come forward to collect your goshuincho once they’re done

• Tokyo Skytree — an observation deck that’s really well organised. T’was slightly pricey but it offers unmatched views across Tokyo; perhaps Shibuya Sky would’ve been better but we had already been to many observation decks and didn’t want yet another one

• Sony Park — a showcase for Sony’s technologies but definitely worth a visit; not touristy at all; one of the exhibitions simulates a live concert and we basically got to experience Creepy Nuts performing their famous Mashle Season 2 opening song with vibrating boom-box benches. The eatery at the basement is also notable. They serve fine dining level of food at very affordable prices (~20 SGD per pax)

• Seiko Museum — a free museum detailing Seiko’s rise in Japan; pretty interesting for a free experience

• Uniqlo Flagship — avoid; came here just for the picture and left because it’s 12 floors and it’s hell to get down once you get up

• Itoya — a famous stationary shop that’s become more of a lifestyle mall now with 8 floors of home-ware; only floors 2-5 sell stationary

• Sengaku-ji Temple — the only temple where goshuins were based on donations BUT you had to write a sutra in return

• Streets of Harajuku — a culturally important place in the 2010s but is mostly now overcommercialised; the backstreets were still interesting tho

• Anakuma Cafe — a unique experience where a bear plays games with you while making your coffee; you also get served your coffee by the bear

• Meiji Jinggu — a large park and shrine

• Shibuya Crossing — had to come here didn’t we?

• B-Pump Akihabara — the mecca of Japanese bouldering for gaijins (foreigners)

• Sento — finally experienced a public bath here on my last day; 11/10 would do it again because of how relaxing it was

Our final stop was Tokyo which was everything we expected from a big city after Yokohama forced us back into city life.

What we didn’t expect was finding aesthetic aspects of Osaka that we missed in Yokohama. It was really the simple things like the sounds of trains making their way through the city, and lamp posts full of that organised chaos of cables that made the difference between Tokyo and Yokohama.

Despite Tokyo being the capital, there were still many nice things about it like the juxtaposition of tall modern skyscrapers, and well preserved single-storey temple/shrine grounds just beside it.

In Tokyo, at least away from the main shopping streets, it felt like there was something interesting hiding/happening just round the corner. It was overcrowded and touristy on the surface given it was also Golden Week, but it felt like there was a local veil that I didn’t quite manage to see through even from behind looking glass during our 7 days here.

Japanese people here were definitely more flashy and modern compared to Osaka too. While in Osaka we’d see many men in (slightly out of shape) suits and ties carrying North Face bagpacks, in Tokyo these were swapped out for fancy leather bags and perfectly tailored suits.

Trains were much more packed as well and everything was in-general just much much more crowded. It was also here that we noticed more “workstations” at train stations and random places in underground malls.

Apparently Japanese workers might get a call anytime and have to head to the nearest “workstation” and open their laptops to do work — we did actually see some of this happening.

✨ Things I’d do in retrospect

Now that my first Japan trip is done and dusted; here’s some advice I would’ve given myself that would probably be useful for anyone who hasn’t been to Japan before. I believe I’m probably the last person in all my social circles to have never been to Japan, but anyways…

1. Book hotels at least 6-8 months in advance —Japan is really crowded especially if you’re intending to visit the golden triangle of Osaka <> Kyoto <> Tokyo. This means hotel rooms get sold out fast, or have price bumps of around 3-4x. Spring and Autumn should definitely be experienced once, but winter and summer is when it gets cheap to go to Japan in terms of accomodations

2. Go from Tokyo to Osaka instead of Osaka to Tokyo — The golden triangle is as such because you need to shop in Osaka instead of Tokyo. Prices are higher in Tokyo, crowds are worse in Tokyo, and Haneda Airport is generally more crowded than Kansai Airport

3. Plan for and book attractions around 4 months in advance — Entry to some attractions require lotteries or extremely early bookings (eg. Nintendo Museum and Yamazki Distillery in Kyoto, Ghibli Museum in Nagoya). Then there’s another wave of bookings that open only a month before. Doing a search for the region you’re going will probably tell you what you need to book early.

4. Schedule for free time — Having a detailed scheduled fits some people, but as it turned out, I didn’t need that detailed of a plan for Japan. While it’s definitely not like Europe where walking the streets can lead to interesting museums and places, you can definitely use Google Maps to find activities in a just-in-time way. Also, rest is important since there’s a lot of walking/stair-climbing involved in Japan.

5. Don’t stress the day-to-day transport — With an IC card like SUICA or ICOCA, taking public transport is a breeze. The only transport that might need booking is the shinkansen trains. There are some potentially-disastrous things that could happen like train decoupling but Google Maps has already accounted for this — get on the exact cars which Google Maps tells you to.

6. Don’t stress the bullet train transport — In the past, you need to redeem physical tickets at the station which could result in missing the train but these days, the official website gives you the QR tickets directly which you can scan at the shinkansen stations to gain entry and go straight up to your train.

7. Stay at hotels away from the city — Our last hotel in Tokyo was 4-5 stops down from our initial hotel at Kanda (one stop away from Tokyo station). Prices were roughly the same but we got a much better room. Streets were less touristy and crowded as well and the surrounding environment was nice and quiet.

8. Learn Japanese — If there was only one advice I could’ve given myself before the trip it would be this. More of it. Maybe till completing DuoLingo section 5. Sumimasen and arigato are cool, but you instantly gain the respect of the person serving you (in a “I’m not your typical foreigner” way) if you can say more than kore this and kore that.

9. But you don’t have to know Japanese — As I experienced, Japan without Japanese is possible if you don’t mind missing out on some more local experiences. Instructions for major attractions and even local trains generally come in both Japanese and English by default, Korean and Chinese are also available at more popular places.

10. Bring a light luggage — I had a new luggage and it was metal. I liked it. Unfortunately, metal luggages are also heavy. Had I chosen a carbon-fibre one, I would’ve had 2 more kilograms of things to bring back

11. Pack light — Halfway through our trip, we realised we had already bought too much stuff. I regretted my decision to bring 4 days worth of clothes — didn’t need it because I bought another 5-6 sets of clothes from GU

12. Buy only Made-in-Japan — Chances are, your luggage allowance won’t have be sufficient to buy everything and anything. Strongly prefer to buy only things that were Made-in-Japan or things that you have done your research on and know it costs a lot less in Japan than your home country

13. Golden Week is kinda nice — I wasn’t looking forward to Golden Week initially but after experiencing it, I’d say go for it if you haven’t experienced it. In Tokyo at least, the holiday is big enough for the government to close off roads, turning 5-lane streets into free-for-all walking paths. There’s also much less office workers and the mood/energy generally feels lighter (we transitioned into Golden Week while we were in Japan and felt the difference that the office worker crowd makes)

Till the next part of this! またね

I’m writing this while fully aware of the negative associations with this topic; ever since learning about it, I’ve been genuinely interested in doing an exploration around this topic just to structure my thoughts around how I’ve grown since adulting began.

When I first saw this trend start, it was on LinkedIn and had obviously been perverted by hustlers who find every chance to shine a spotlight on themselves. They do them I guess.

But as I thought more about it, I found it interesting when the question kept popping up in my mind at different places: “How would my 18 year old self be in this situation?”

Also, I thought it’d be useful to both write this as a literary exercise and also share it because I think as an 18 year old, it’d would’ve been nice to know the perspective of someone who was in their 30s. I remember feeling like I only had access to older people in their 50s who’re nearing the endgame of their career, and friends who had recently graduated. The people “in the middle” of their careers were elusive as hell.

Anyway, my journal, my rules. Skip this if you want/think it’s going to be humblebragging like majority of such posts on LinkedIn and the likes.

At a coffeeplace…

I called up my younger self for coffee.

He wanted to meet at Starbucks.

I wanted to meet at a specialty coffee shop.

He really wanted Starbucks.

I gave in because he’s young and we met at his favourite Coffee Bean at Millenia Walk.

He ordered his usual chocolate frappe. And a peanut butter cake.

I went with a latte because for some reason a flat white is more expensive.

He frowned at my order. So bitter.

I frowned at his order. So sweet. So expensive.

We started chatting.

He was super passionate about bouldering.

We agreed to meet for a climb one of these days.

He also played the guitar every day and was producing music.

I told him that’s luxury of time and we’d eventually have to let it go.

He looked at me in disappointment.

He asked me what were we doing as an adult.

I said we were lucky to do what we did as a kid — write code.

He was surprised, he said he thought we were gonna be scientists modifying DNA and shit.

I told him we would be for awhile, but a unique encounter and opportunity would change our destiny.

He laughed and told me not to tell him the details. He liked the adventure.

I wondered why, I would’ve wanted to know.

He asked if being an adult was boring.

I said I loved having the money to do what we want.

He understood and nodded, he had never had enough money after all.

He asked if school really was the best time of our lives.

I said for us it wouldn’t be.

He liked that response. I knew how glad he was with that answer.

He asked if we eventually found someone and got married.

I said yes, but it’s not to the person he’s with right now.

He nodded, deep inside, even he knew she wasn’t “the one”.

Finally he asked about our family.

I said it’d be a crazy journey in the next few years.

He was confused and really wanted to know what happened.

I said no, this is the one path you’ll have to journey into alone.

We’d turn out fine anyways. I was fine in anyways.

We arranged to meet for bouldering, then we parted ways.

He went to meet friends and started his walk there.

I went to the carpark.

At the bouldering gym…

He was early by an hour.

I was 30 minutes late.

He was sending a V6 by the time I reached.

I started warming up.

He was surprised seeing me wasting time to warm up.

I told him age will catch up..

He laughed. I knew he was thinking “how weak I’ve become”.

I hopped onto a warm-up route.

He said “Oi, you only can climb V1?”

I said it was a warm up climb.

He genuinely couldn’t see why anyone would climb at a lower grade.

I couldn’t too, but I knew enough to know I had to warm up.

I finished my warm-up routine.

He was stuck on a problem that required catching a dyno.

I sent it with ease.

He was surprised. He was weak at dynamic routes.

He tried for about an hour more after that.

I couldn’t understand how he could do the same route over and over again for an hour.

His fingers were raw by that time. But I knew to him it didn’t matter.

I knew he loved pain.

30+ year old me didn’t.

We settled on a crimpy route for our last problem.

With raw fingers and an aching shoulder, he sent it with ease.

I could barely hold on. My shoulder was killing me and my fingers had reached it’s limits.

We began packing up.

He started banging out pull-ups.

I started brushing the chalk off my shoes.

“You actually do that?” he sneered.

I laughed and said, “yes, it’s important”.

Then I started stretching to cool-down.

He had completed another set of one arm pull-ups and was doing normal pull-ups now.

It was almost night by then.

He didn’t want to go home. He said he’ll hang around for a bit more.

I told him I really wanted to go home and just die on my bed.

He asked if our eventual home was that nice to be in.

I said yes, he’d love home eventually too.

He asked to come over and we arranged a date.

We parted ways.

At home…

And of course he was early.

He was surprised at how close it was to the house we grew up in.

Again, I told him these were things to worry about later in life.

He had mixed feelings about the place.

I knew what he had in mind. He wanted to get away from it all.

He asked why didn’t we get somewhere far away.

He asked why didn’t we at least get an apartment with a different layout.

I told him he’d understand when the time was right.

He was excited about seeing our first electric guitar in my work room.

I told him it’s now rusty, like me.

He was just so amazed that I still had it nearly 20 years on.

He saw another guitar and asked about it.

I told him we’d get it during our performing era. He hadn’t started performing.

He got excited and asked if we’d ever play at the Esplanade.

We didn’t, but I knew he wouldn’t have wanted to hear the answer either way.

I told him he’d see for himself.

Then the cats brushed along his legs.

He moved away cautiously.

I picked the cat up and put it in his face.

He laughed and moved away. He said he’d always had intrusive thoughts of lighting a cat’s balls on fire.

I smiled. He would get to do that in a few years time while drunk and on duty in National Service.

Maybe taking care of two cats now is my God-imposed penance for doing that, I thought to myself.

He looked at my desk setup and said “wow, we’re really full-time programmers”.

I laughed and said yes, we really ended up being programmers. It was our first love after all.

He said he was still using the pirated Visual Studio we got from Holiday Plaza in Johor.

I said I know, it’s something we’d brag about in future.

I showed him how we communicate with each other in 2025 on Telegram.

He said he thought it was MSN Messenger at first.

I showed him VSCode.

He said it looked almost exactly the same as Visual Studio.

“So things remain basically the same from the second half 2000s?” he asked.

I nodded as I took out my iPhone, “see?”

That boy was definitely going to buy and earlier than I did.

Reflections

So it ended a bit abruptly. No apologies for that, it’s late and I was just doing an exercise in exploring what he might’ve said and what I would’ve responded. To see how things have changed, how I’ve grown, or how I’ve regressed.

1. Over the years I’ve seemingly become Yet Another Boring Adult™. I might be justifying here, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Flirting with hobbies and going to extremes with them served me well in my younger days, but they no longer served me in adulthood. Time became a scarce resource, energy became something dedicated to earning money, physical strength became something that slipped away ever so inevitably. I don’t think I changed fundamentally, but over the years I’ve learnt how to live this lifestyle in a sustainable way. At 18 I guess I had reached version 1 — the raw but functioning POC that hasn’t seen day 1 operations.

2. In my youth I was blessed enough to have figured out what I truly enjoyed doing (and I suspect most people in Singapore at least, would have). I put them aside while making my entrance into the world of a Contributing Member of Society, but they have come back to haunt me. Like I did in my early years, I still sit at a computer and code away — except now I get paid for it. Like I did in my teens, bouldering is still my go-to activity. Like I enjoyed in my early adulthood, playing the guitar relaxes me.

3. The most disciplined and sure I ever was of myself was in my youth. If I were to have a child, I now see the importance of instilling both confidence and discipline as young as possible. It only goes downhill once the keys to the kingdom/freedoms of adulthood are granted. When everything’s shouting for my attention, it’s still the confidence and discipline I had that carries me through.

4. Even if I learnt things the proper way when I was young, it’s only in adulthood that they came through. Like how I always knew I should maintain my equipment but I didn’t — climbing shoes, guitar, shoes, everything. It’s only as things age and things break that I finally saw why I had to do these things. And it’s stuck with me.

5. As I grew, the concept of what family was changed. I remember doing everything within my power to stay out. If a curfew was at 11 PM, I’d be home then. When the curfew got extended to 1 AM, I was home only then. Over the years, especially as folks grow older, I learnt to appreciate what they had done and to accept what they could not. As someone who’s probably going to be a parent (God-willing) soon-ish, I see that “adults” don’t know it all/got it all together. Life is not easy. If you even had the capacity to enjoy your youth and say it was fulfilling looking back, it was definitely because you were enabled to do so by your parents: who were probably struggling with their own lives back then when they were “adults”.

6. If I could attribute my adult growth to a single canon event, it would be learning/practicing life coaching & counselling. Up till my late twenties, I was retrospectively in constant turmoil after getting the keys to the kingdom. While school life is safe, guarded, and very structured, the “industry” is an unsafe, free-for-all, dog-eat-dog, “it’s up-to-you” world. I lacked the ability to make sense of it all and this led to a latent anxiety (probably borne from doing relatively well academically with low to near zero effort) manifesting itself. Thankfully, I’ve since evolved past that through renewing my understanding of how the world works. It took the better part of 7 years since my first anxiety-related panic attack, but here I am and I daresay I’m loving life as it is right now.

Alright, it’s late. I’m publishing this and heading to bed.

If you’ve read this far, I hope it was useful/enjoyable.

Till the next post!

A month ago, the wife and I decided to get a camera as a shared hobby of sorts.

One month into going around taking photographs of things and people, I think I’ve figured out at least the heuristics involved around photography as a skill and how it can be developed over time.

Here’s my journey so far.

Introduction (+ how to get a camera)

While it’s my first time owning and operating and having creative direction on a proper camera, it’s not my first rodeo in photography. I’ve been involved with photography for more than a decade now assisting photographers and doing post-editing.

Could never bring myself to spend to get a proper camera. Until both my wife and 2024 came along.

The camera we ended up getting was a Fujifilm X-S20. We got it from T.K. Foto located in Funan Center after trying out all the usual suspects (Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus) there.

Our main decision factors were:

1. Photos looked great straight out of the camera - We aren’t professional and don’t intend to be anytime soon. Fujifilm’s cameras had film simulations with colour gradings that looked great straight-out-of-camera. Neither of us wanted to spend hours editing RAW files

2. The camera was light - This was a consideration based on advice from a photographer on YouTube. If it’s light, you’ll take it out, you’ll take photos. If it’s heavy, you might not take out, you may not have photos to take

3. APS-C lenses were cheaper - As beginners, we were more than happy with the kit lens, but we were also told that the journey of photography tends to involve shooting with new lenses. APS-C lenses were more easily obtained and came at a cheaper price than full-frame lenses

4. Presence of a physical IBIS - Image stabilisation was something that intuitively felt important to us and I had a distrust of the digital image stabilisation in Sony cameras. After a month of using the Fujifilm X-S20, I’d say that it helped a lot especially when attempting street photography where I’d often only have a few seconds to focus and click.

5. Improving lens ecosystem - Fujifilm was previously known to lack lenses. We heard from the store that this is changing ever since Fujifilm has decided to officially endorse third party lens makers like Sigma. Specifically for Fujifilm as well, there’s also Sirui and Samyang that makes lenses with X-mounts (Fujifilm’s mount type)

6. Felt the least digital - All cameras are digital these days, but Fujifilm’s software felt less so than the others. To make things worse, Sony’s demo set glitched 2-3 times in the 30 minutes I was playing with it which added to my already-high distrust of software

The main things we learnt to look out for while on the journey to get a camera were:

1. Megapixel count - This is a factor that comes into play if you’re intending to print stuff. Pictures you take will usually be cropped post-editing. More megapixels means you can crop more of an image away and still end up with a picture that’s sharp

2. Main body weight - Having a bulky/heavy body is not an issue if you’re professional, but if you’re pursuing photography as a hobby, a heavy body means you’d be less inclined to bring your camera out with you. Camera not with you == lesser pictures taken == less experience gained

3. Lens ecosystem - Most people we met and talked to along the journey spoke about growing with the camera as part of their journey in photography. This involves purchasing/loaning new lenses to achieve different shots. Lenses are generally tied to their manufacturers — IE Sony lenses fit only Sony cameras — via their mount systems. It’s becoming less of an issue with mount adapters and third party lens manufacturers that produce lenses with different camera makers’ mounts

4. Sensor size - This refers to how big of a shot you can capture. For hobby photography (IMO at least), it starts at full-frame, followed by APS-C (our camera’s sensor size), then micro 4/3. Anything smaller and you’ll be in the domain of compact digital cameras and you might as well use your phone’s camera

5. Weather sealing - This was something we ignored when getting our camera mainly because we didn’t expect to be wanting to go out when there’s rain anyways. It hasn’t been an issue for us, but it could be especially if you intend to bring you camera out into nature or environments with lots of dust or water.

A mental model for learning photography

So after a month, I’ve roughly grasped the handling of the Fujifilm X-S20. It’s been a journey of learning and getting used to how controls work and diving in deep into the settings.

While I wouldn’t say I’ve mastered it, I think I’ve learnt enough to know the different domains where putting time and effort in would yield progress in terms of taking better — more satisfiying — photographs.

For me, an activity becomes a skill when the concept of mastery is involved (IE you get better over time and can vary outcomes in a controlled manner based on your level of skill), and here are the five domains that I currently consider skills in photography:

1. Theory - Mastery over the theory behind a good photograph

2. Operational - Mastery over a camera’s handling

3. Tooling - Mastery over different tools associated with the camera

4. Creativity - Mastery over the skills to achieve subjective and arbitrary outcomes

5. Self - Mastery over self to be able to take the pictures you want to take

Theory

As with any topic that enables expertise progression, photography has a set of basic theories. IMO these are:

1. Exposure triangle - This is a triangle with the three points to balance being Aperture, Shutter-Speed, and ISO. The theory is that for any desired exposure, achieving it is a balance between the three heuristics where adding to one requires subtracting from another to return the exposure to the desired one.

2. Colour theory - What colours complement/contrast well with each other naturally to the human eye?

3. Image composition - How/where should subjects be relative to each other and to the frame of the picture so that the outcome is satisfying?

Operational

This domain is definitely lacking since I’ve only used one camera from one brand. Since the handling of a camera differs from brand to brand, this domain is something that’s camera body specific. It’s still a valid domain IMO because how often would you realistically expect to change cameras?

1. Assisted shooting modes (P/A/S/M modes) - I believe these are universal across all camera models. You have the Aperture-priority mode (A mode), the Shutter-Speed-priority mode (S mode), Programme mode (P mode) which is almost like Auto but not fully, and finally Manual mode (M mode) where everything is configured by you. Learning how to use each mode in the right context can help you get the shot you need especially in situations where time is limited

2. Auto-focus - Majority of cameras these days will have some kind of auto-focus. This also comes in various types such as Single AF, Continuous AF, and even Tracking AF to be used in different contexts. Knowing when to use which lets you capture an image with intention.

3. Custom modes - Most cameras come with a few modes that’s dedicated to configurations set by you. What does your custom mode look like for what kind of environments and how effective are they in helping you to capture a shot in time?

4. Data formats - As a beginner, I shoot in JPEG. I’m frankly also too lazy to do any sort of post-editing and I’d rather publish straight-out-of-camera pictures where the picture speaks for itself. But data formats especially when it comes to video seems like an area where mastery is possible.

Tooling

Arguably tooling is not exactly an area of expertise that can be developed over time since money buys you pretty decent stuff.

I’m including tooling as a domain of expertise mainly because, while you could recklessly spend thousands to get equipment, it doesn’t necessarily result in a good picture. Knowing how to use the tooling to achieve the results you want does, and that involves a time & effort investment.

1. Lenses - What lenses are appropriate for the type of environment you have decided to shoot in? Bringing a prime lens (lenses with fixed focal lengths) to shoot birds for example is no-no. Prime lenses at the correct focal length however are great for street photography especially for night shoots, and knowing what focal length to use for your shooting preference/environment/cultural context is a skill.

2. Filters - Different types of shots require different types of filters. For example, there’s the pro-mist filter which softens edges around lens flares and makes night shots feel softer, and the Natural Density (ND) filters which let you take long-exposure shots in the day. Knowing what filters exist and how to use them can help you achieve different results that help to tell the story you want to tell.

3. Post-editing - I personally haven’t done much of this but based on the works of photographers that I’m following on Instagram, post-editing forms a huge part of the work when creating an intentional photograph. I prefer straight-out-of-camera, but I can also tell that for a picture to really stand out, post-editing is required.

There’s also tripods, but IMO a good tripod is just anything that helps to keep your camera absolutely still. Not exactly a skillset although you could argue it to be when it comes to uneven terrain, but that’s a matter of general resourcefulness IMO.

Creativity

This domain of expertise refers to how the above are put together to achieve a “you” shot.

It’s easy to get a 100 MP camera and take a sharp and correctly-exposed image with brilliant colours in Adobe sRGB using Auto Mode, but to be able to hint/tell a story through a single photograph through synthesising basic theory/operating the camera in unique ways is a skill.

1. Aperture & depth-of-field - Opening the aperture (smaller display value, larger lens opening) results in a narrower depth-of-field. How could this side-effect focus be used to tell the story you want to?

2. Shutter speed & motion blur - Faster shutter speeds allow the camera sensor to be more precise with the information it captures. Slower shutter speeds result in a slight blur of anything moving. How could this side-effect be used to tell a story?

3. ISO & grain - The general recommendation is to shoot at an as-low-as-possible ISO rating. High ISO ratings usually result in some sort of noise appearing since sensor sensitivity is based on electrical current and results in compression when the currents approach the maximum capacity of the circuitry

4. Light - A random YouTube video I watched claimed that photography is fundamentally a search for light. After a few weeks shooting with that in mind, I think it’s true. Recognising light and knowing how light reflects allows you to shoot interesting shots. Black-and-white photography relies on this heavily for example

5. Colours - Colours naturally invoke emotions. Being able to recognise these in your surroundings and use them in a similar way to how art uses colours lets you nudge a story you want to tell in a direction you want it to go

6. Framing - There’s the frame of a picture that’s bounded by what the camera can see, but you could also introduce another frame within which the subject lies. When expertly done, this can draw a viewer’s eyes to the right subject and create a better experience of the story you want to tell from your picture

Self

When we first got our camera, I believed I would be mainly interested in nature and macro shots. I was completely wrong. I ended up really loving street photography AKA invading many people’s privacies in public spaces.

Pursuing street photography made me realise how self-conscious I was about taking pictures of interesting people/events. Using a phone to take a picture is very different from taking a picture holding a device made specifically to take pictures, and you will notice people noticing you when you’re holding said large device made specifically to take pictures.

I realised this was an area of expertise to progress in. It could be self-work to get over the self-consciousness, or lies to tell yourself to ease the self-consciousness, or even techniques that let people feel more at ease around you.

Extrapolating how I felt, I realised this would apply regardless in other genres of photography. For example, if you wanted to capture a picture of beetle close-up but hated bugs. Or if you wanted to take food pictures but dislike being seen as the type who has to let “the camera eat first”.

Kthxbye

Alrights, that’s all for my first month navigating a new skill. I hope it has been useful for you anon.

Write again soon!

My 34th birthday happened recently and I kind of wondered what I would have to say to someone if they asked me for life advice. In a y’know LinekdIn sort of way where influcners would write X pieces of advice for Y year olds pieces?

Would I consider myself “wise” if I was ten years younger and got told things that my ten years older self knew? Would these even be useful to my ten-years-younger self? Would these just be ramblings of an older jaded adult?

Anyway, here’s a playful 34 thoughts and unsolicited advice that I think I would like to tell my 24-year old self if I could go back in time.

You be the judge I guess.

34 things I would’ve liked to tell my younger self

So I wrote these down in a 34-item list, but decided to section them into categories for ease of referencing.

As a sidenote, it’s also interesting to notice how at this age, relationships seems to be a big part of advice that I would naturally spew out. I was initially expecting more work-related points but it is what it is!

Relationships

1. Romantic relationships are the least important relationships to focus on forming but the most important relationship to commit to and maintain

2. Your romantic relationship is only one of many relationships, a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction only comes when all your relationships are in a balance that you intuitively know is just right

3. You can’t and shouldn’t make anyone stay if they want to leave. Let everyone who wants to go, go

4. All friends will come and go, trust in the process and know that the right people will present themselves at the right time in your life to journey with you. Treasure them while they’re around, wish them all the best when it’s time to part ways

5. All relationships are intentional, the quality of your relationships depends on the effort you put into it

6. It’s very hard to form meaningful friendships after you hit your thirties, people getting married play a big part in this. Treasure the ones you have

7. For people to enter your life, you need a door that can be opened

8. You won’t and can’t maintain a relationship with everyone, choose your associations wisely and intentionally

9. Intentional forming and maintenance of relationships can seem transactional, but it’s far more fulfilling than leaving it up to destiny.

10. Carving out time for someone/someone carving out time for you is a green flag. Romanticism is just a fantasy and living it out as if it was reality is the real red flag

11. Your view on the world/life will be affected by your relationships more than you will ever imagine, especially so for your romantic relationship

Life

1. Believe in a god - any one will do - and practice their ways

2. 留情不出手，出手不留情 - Either go all the way, or do not go at all

3. You will not rise to the occasion, you will fall to the level of your practice

4. If you don’t ask, you won’t receive

5. Be a regular somewhere. Anywhere

6. Nothing is ever fully in your control, learn to live with uncertainty

7. People genuinely want you to succeed and will inevitably be envious when you succeed, it’s not a bad thing

8. Whether you accept it or not, you have a moral duty to give back to your community when/if you succeed

9. Always know what is “enough” for you in everything you do, in every aspect of life. There’s always an enough. Always

10. Have strong opinions, but hold them loosely

Finance

1. Money will be abundant until it’s very suddenly not. Save and invest as much as you can while it feels abundant

2. Money is always just a means to an end. Exchange it often for your happiness. Again, while you can. With what you can

3. For most people, investment is socially-approved gambling. Learn to invest, not gamble. It’s the only way to be feel financially abundant later in life (see point 1)

4. Avoid getting into gambling but leave the door open for divine intervention

5. Unless an amount is in your bank account, it’s not your money, do not plan your future around it

Mission

1. Start with the outcome in mind

2. Knowledge is cheap, context is expensive

3. Start from a place of motivation, execute from a place of discipline, achieve outcomes from a place of principles

4. Respect and be loyal to only yourself and your agenda, as are organisations loyal to only themselves and their agenda

5. It’s perfectly okay to sacrifice agenda for money (IE work for someone else) as long as it’s worth it to you

6. All jobs are economic transactions, get the most you want for as little as you can put in. Focus on what you want out of it, give only what helps you achieve it, vary according to required mileage

7. You are replaceable. You are replaceable. You are replaceable

8. For most, your mission shouldn’t be your identity

Cheers

I sincerely hope some points sparked reflection for you, anon. It’d also be nice if you let me know if it did but it’s also alright if you don’t =D

Happy birthday to myself! Looking forward to another year of becoming wiser (hopefully)

This post is part of a blog series reviewing all the bouldering gyms in Singapore targeted at new climbers and foreign visitors. Check out the origin article here:

Project Send Review

At a glance

Environment: 5/5 - By far one of the cleanest and most well-maintained gyms in Singapore with almost any QoL amenities you can think of including well-made coffee and pastries. There’s even nice views from the gym’s windows. Only nitpick if you force it is there’s no onsite toilets, but the mall toilets are just next to the gym.

Social experience: 5/5 - Very friendly environment, maybe even more so than BM at times. There’s stuff like bean bags and nicely designed off-mattress areas that make the place cosy and conducive for friendly interactions. Gym staff here are also relatively friendlier than other gyms.

Training experience: 5/5 - For me — a V4/5 climber — this gym is perfect for training dynamic moves. There’s a good mix of static and dynamic routes but IMO this gym does really well in setting routes with complex dynamic moves but at lower grades and lower commitment levels. There’s also a well equipped gym at the comp wall area.

Around the area: 5/5 - Many watering holes and restaurants nearby. There’s also the makansutra food court which serves decent food, and there’s always Suntec City and Marina Square within 15 minutes walking distance for more affordable food and entertainment.

In point form

1. Well-maintained and cosy gym featuring routes with accessible dynamic movements

2. Onsite showers, changing rooms, washing area. Mall toilets are just outside the gym.

3. Very very decent cafe food and drinks available on-site (so you can’t bring your own food in — if you do, you’ll have to eat it in the al-fresco area)

4. Crowd levels are good most of the time, doesn’t ever get too crowded

5. Good mix of tourists and locals compared to other gyms

6. Mostly climbers are at the beginner to intermediate levels

7. Mostly slab, straight, and inclined walls. Only a small overhang section

8. Walls are low and safe with routes that can span up to 3 faces

9. Good mix of beginner to advanced routes with (seemingly) a focus on dynamic movements at accessible grades

10. Grades here are slightly soft for the equivalent V grade, but what are grades anyway?

11. Endurance wall and hangboards are available

12. 7-11 downstairs at level 1 which has Betagro chicken breasts for pre-sesh protein

13. Lots of good food and entertainment within a 15 minute walking distance, some notable places where I’ve personally gone to after climbs for food: Makansutra Gluttons Bay (temporarily closed tho), Marina Square food court and MacDonalds

Logistics

1. Grades: Colour-based, starts at pink (VB/0) with the first noticeable difficulty jump at red (V3/4), then green (V5/6), and then brown (V7/8). Grades go up to black (V9+). Slightly soft for the V-grade equivalent as of Q42024

2. Shoe rentals and socks sales available

3. Download the Project Send app to sign the waiver, pass purchase is available over the counter

4. Check for after-work classes which run from 7:30-8:30ish on weekdays and can result in some closed-off areas

5. If you’re using someone’s multipass, message the staff on Instagram first, you’ll need your friend’s phone number.

6. Parking is expensive around the area during work hours, avoid driving if you can. Marina Square has cheap parking on weekends and after 5PM.

7. Nearest MRTs: Esplanade (orange line), Promenade (blue/orange line)

8. Route resets are slightly unpredictable but generally half the gym gets reset every month. They’ll announce it on Instagram with beta sneak peeks.

9. Ask them questions via Instagram DM

Links

• Link to Google Maps

• Link to place on Instagram

• Company website link

• Boulder Movement Instagram

Personal Story

Came to this gym only about a year into climbing because of their previous pass prices which used to be $24 at multi-pass rates (it’s now $18). Took lots of convincing before my climbing buddies were willing to try this gym 😅

The location and availability of an on-site cafe was what first attracted me here since I could arrive in the afternoon before public transport gets crowded, complete my work at the cafe with a cuppa, and then start climbing immediately after work ends.

Climbs here have always been enjoyable and have been the kind that can help me get out of my head and into my body. After a few months of coming here, I now recognise that it’s because of the focus on dynamic moves where you just have to trust your body knows what to do instead of deciding what to logically do on the wall.

Personally, I love how the gym’s also designed with areas for chilling with friends. There’s beanbags around to just sit and chat, and there’s also a spacious sitting area near the back of the gym with a nice view of the postcard Singapore skyline.

Climbers here tend to be friendly (but I mean, how do you not get in a good mood with how nice this gym is?) but also of beginner-to-intermediate levels. You won’t find much beta here for the more advanced routes — which can be a nice thing if you enjoy figuring out routes for yourself.

This gym is one that I think I’ll always have passes for. Helps that this part of Singapore is one of my favourites too.

One of the things you might want to checkout before coming here tho is whether there’s any classes or company events which can result in closed-off spaces. They’ll usually announce these on their Instagram prior.

Cheers

Till the next review 😀

Got comments/feedback? You can DM me regarding gym bouldering in Singapore at @boulder.joernal on Instagram. Also, always keen to meet new people, ping me for a climb if you want!

This post is part of a blog series reviewing all the bouldering gyms in Singapore targeted at new climbers and foreign visitors. Check out the origin article here:

Boulder Movement (BM) Rochor Review

At a glance

Environment: 4/5 - As clean as BM gyms get despite the larger area. Full set of QoL amenities except there’s no on-site toilet (use the mall’s which is a short walk away).

Social experience: 5/5 - This gym rivals BM Downtown as a place where visitors tend to socialise. Fun routes with decent off-mat areas allows for conversations to happen spontaneously without worrying anyone’s going to fall on you. Also since it’s in a tourist-accessible location, you’ll frequently see people from overseas here for a climb.

Training experience: 4/5 - While this gym’s main selling point is that it’s fun (IMO at least), it still provides enough to come for a decent training session. Cave routes here are almost always sandbagged and good for power endurance training, and the slab section is somewhat infamous amongst BM-goers for the presence of at least one (accessible) no-hands slab route. Also, endurance wall and kilter board are here to let you max out.

Around the area: 4/5 - Depending on where you come from, Little India may seem scary, but really it’s very safe. There’s lots of awesome authentic Indian cuisine walking in the direction to Farrer Park if you’re adventurous (NGL can be intimidating to walk into some of the stalls there), and towards the Bendemeer side you’ll find Dim Sum restaurants start to pop up. It’s also a short 10 minutes walk to Bugis.

In point form

1. The BM gym to go to if one of your aims is to have fun with friends/socialise.

2. Onsite showers, changing rooms, washing area, and water-cooler available.

3. Sofa area + bar tables area available for chilling

4. Not a dungeon - there’s windows with sunlight during sunlight hours

5. Decent crowd levels even at maximum capacity, it’s one of the bigger BM gyms

6. Demographics are mostly local with a few tourists most of the time.

7. All types of walls available: slab, straight, inclined, overhang, cave

8. Walls are mid-level, no highballers except for the cave area which is slightly higher than the other walls and can be scary to fall from if your route reaches the top of that wall

9. Routes are relatively more straightforward here compared to other outlets (doesn’t mean easier) and usually have feed-good big moves (I’m not advanced-enough a climber to put that in technical terms)

10. Grading here is slightly softer than normal except for the cave area - that whole wall is usually sandbagged.

11. Climbing-specific training quipment like a kilter board, endurance wall, and hangboards are available

12. Nice cosy mezzanine level to hang out at for non-commercial routes training

13. 7-11 within a 5 minute walking distance which has Betagro chicken breasts for pre-sesh protein

14. Lots of good food within a 15 minute walking distance, some notable places where I’ve personally gone to after climbs: Sarigama Bar & Bistro (North Indian cuisine), Swee Choon (Dim Sum), Keisuke Ramen (Japanese). There’s also the original Selegie Road beancurd stall towards Dhoby Gaut side.

Logistics

1. Grades: 1-8 petals, with 1s being V0/V1, 2s being V1/2 till 8 which is V7+

2. Shoe rentals and socks sales available

3. Download the Boulder Movement app and sign the waiver, pass purchase is also through the app only

4. One of the few gyms which is crowd-controlled, you’ll need to book a slot, likely in advance to be able to get in, two slots are avaialble each day, 11 AM - 4:30PM, and 5:30PM - 10PM.

5. If you’re using someone’s multipass, get them to link you in their app via email, they will have to book the slot for you

6. Parking is expensive here, avoid driving if you can. There’s a public carpark just behind Bugis+ but it’s usually full near/during peak hours.

7. Nearest MRTs: Rochor (Blue Line), Little India (Purple/Blue Line)

8. Checkout BM’s website/Instagram for routesetting schedule

9. Checkout BM’s Google Maps place for opening hours

10. Ask them questions via Instagram DM

Links

• Link to Google Maps

• Link to place on Instagram

• Company website link

• Boulder Movement Instagram

Personal Story

This is the BM gym which I didn’t visit until my 6th month into my BM membership. No idea why but my climbing companions and I kept rotating between only Downtown and Taiseng.

Eventually came here anyway and found the rumours that this outlet was BM’s most fun to be true. There’s also the feel-good element when grades are slightly softer than usual and when the gym doesn’t feel congested even at maximum capacity.

My first V4/5 flash happened at this wall above and it was at a time when I wasn’t sending V4s regularly yet. Many routes are on the softer side, but don’t underestimate the cave (which sadly I forgot to take pictures of on my last visit because someone had a bad fall there and it just didn’t seem right to take pictures)

There’s also a nice mezzanine level where there’s an endurance wall together with a unique spray wall. This endurance wall is harder than the Taiseng outlet’s IMO although I haven’t trained here that much. Only got up to move 15/16 the last time I tried (I could complete Taiseng’s circuit once then IIRC)

Overall, highly recommended if you’re visiting Singapore and itching for a climb. There’s the Indian Heritage Center in the building just next door which I found surprisingly good, and also while the streets of Little India may seem dangerous if you’re from a predominantly fair-skinned places, it’s fairly safe and is one of the places where the street culture is noticeably different from other places in Singapore. If you prefer a more curated experience tho, Tekka market and the Little India Arcade have some historical value while still being exposed to the general culture around the area.

Also recommended for local beginners looking for a fun session!

Cheers

Till the next review 😀

Got comments/feedback? You can DM me regarding gym bouldering in Singapore at @boulder.joernal on Instagram. Also, always keen to meet new people, ping me for a climb if you want!

This post is part of a blog series reviewing all the bouldering gyms in Singapore targeted at new climbers and foreign visitors. Check out the origin article here:

Boulder Movement (BM) Bugis Review

At a glance

Environment: 3/5 - In the grander scheme of things, this gym is clean; but not as clean as the other BM gyms and also there’s occasional ceiling leaks here resulting in puddled chalk. Gets unbearably (IMO) crowded during peak hours made worse by having few dedicated off-mat areas. Toilets are also off-site but there’s on-site water coolers, showers, changing rooms, and the usual (for BM) power plugs. No proper seat/table tho

Social experience: 3/5 - Unlike other BMs, you might not get to socialise as much here during peak hours if that’s what you like about climbing. Felt like everyone’s just moving around avoiding other climbers’ fall zones and also most people come here with their own groups and the tend to stick to them.

Training experience: 4/5 - One of the more “fun” gyms with more accessible higher-grade routes. Highest walls amongst all the BM outlets which means a different style of routesetting given the height capacity. A unique and very fun traverse wall is also available and there’s also the moonboard which is above my paygrade.

Around the area: 5/5 - This gym is located in Bugis, and you can’t go wrong in Bugis. Lots of food from street snacks (Bugis Street) to restos (Bugis+ and Bugis Junction) to shopping malls, to famous ramen (Keisuke), to watering holes. This place has it all for both pre and post climb activities.

In point form

1. The highballer edition BM outlet with fun routes. Located in a popular shopping mall with lots of food and entertainment options around

2. Mostly slightly inclined and straight walls. Two small overhang sections available. No slab wall

3. One overhang section wall is usually entirely wildcard-graded (fun wall imo)

4. Routesetting seems to favour dynamic and coordination movements, routes tend to be more upwards moving as compared to sideways at other gyms with lower walls

5. There’s usually one super-interesting comp-style wildcard problem on the center island wall

6. Traverse wall available with about 5-6 routes that can also be done in reverse to make 10-12 routes. This wall was previously a toprope high wall (if you were reading Google Maps reviews and thought it’s still there,)

7. Moonboard area available

8. No gym equipment available at this gym

9. Demographics tends to be on the younger side, usually a few groups of new climbers to be careful about

10. Feels dangerous when it gets crowded because of a combination of higher-than-usual walls and lack of dedicated no-mat areas

11. Really good food both cheap and expensive around the area, lots of entertainment and sightseeing options as well

12. Recommended for tourists since it’s also near touristy areas

13. Not recommended for beginners especially those with a fear of heights

Logistics

1. Grades: 1-8 petals, with 1s being V0/V1, 2s being V1/2 till 8 which is V7+

2. Shoe rentals and socks sales available

3. Download the Boulder Movement app and sign the waiver, pass purchase is also through the app only

4. One of the few gyms which is crowd-controlled, you’ll need to book a slot, likely in advance to be able to get in, two slots are avaialble each day, 11 AM - 4:30PM, and 5:30PM - 10PM.

5. If you’re using someone’s multipass, get them to link you in their app via email, they will have to book the slot for you

6. Parking is expensive here, avoid driving if you can. There’s a public carpark just behind Bugis+ but it’s usually full near/during peak hours.

7. Nearest MRTs: Bugis (Green/Blue Line)

8. Checkout BM’s website/Instagram for routesetting schedule

9. Checkout BM’s Google Maps place for opening hours

10. Ask them questions via Instagram DM

Links

• Link to Google Maps

• Link to place on Instagram

• Company website link

• Boulder Movement Instagram

Personal Story

My first visit to BM Bugis was terrifying.

I was used to the lower walls of BM Downtown and didn’t have a problem falling from those heights. But BM Bugis was something else.

The height here is similar to BFF Bendemeer’s main walls which isn’t very friendly to beginners IMO. In anyways, that fear was normalised after climbing more and on my latest visit, I found this gym to be one of the more fun BM gyms.

Once I gained more distinctions in routesetting style, I noticed that routes here at the V3/4 and above levels are more cryptic (interesting) and enjoyable. Also if you’re the kind to chase grades, difficulty gradings are slightly softer here given the increased level of commitment needed for the dynamic/coordination moves which sometimes happen at the top

One thing that still holds me back from coming here more often is the lack of dedicated rest places. You can see above that the entire floor is covered in mattress — which is nice for safety while climbing — but also a hazard when new climbers which this gym attracts sit in a fallzone.

The other is higher walls. Falls from high up can result in injuries (I’m 30+, I get pains easily 🙈). Coincidentally, my first semi-serious injury was from this gym where I fell badly after overestimating my span. Had hip and neck pains for about 2 weeks.

The best thing about this gym tho is the availability of food nearby. My personal staple is Keisuke Ramen which has free eggs for post-sesh protein, but you’ll need to leave way before this outlet closes to get there before they stop serving ramen.

Cheers

Till the next review 😀

Got comments/feedback? You can DM me regarding gym bouldering in Singapore at @boulder.joernal on Instagram. Also, always keen to meet new people, ping me for a climb if you want!