I have now been in Japan for 11 years. I still sometimes laugh at how I thought it was a good idea to move between Christmas and New Years, but it ultimately worked out in the end. Partially due to this, my 来日 (arrival in Japan) anniversary is also a good year-review time. Though I have not accomplished nearly as much as I had naively hoped for, I still think overall it was a good year. Hopefully I will be able to show more progress in 2026.

Work

I am still on an extended break from traditional employement. I am very lucky I am in a position where I can take a break. While I am generally always open to a casual interview, most of them have left me unimpressed.

I will quickly admit to rose-colored glasses, but there is a strong feeling that many companies now exist only to extract/capture value instead of creating value. It is hard to motivate myself to get excited about assorted marketing companies or anything that brands itself as an “AI” company.

Ideally I would find something that I can do on my own (or with a small team) that can create value and provide a comfortable lifestyle without giving up on my principals. Will have to see how 2026 turns out on that front.

Games

My gaming group has continued and we’ve gone through several more games . Highlights from this year.

• Factorio Space Age
• V-Rising
• Mechwarrior 5: Clans - Ghost Bear: Flash Storm
• Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries - Shadow of Kerensky

I would like to try to write more mini reviews as a record for some comments on games.

Side Projects

I continued to work with django and other python projects and also blog about them some. I am quite proud of some of the rust projects I have started as well, even if I am still a beginner there. I wonder if there is a good place to find a mentor for things like rust that could help me review some pull requests to my own projects and suggest better ways to do things or places I should read up on more.

As part of my projects to reduce dependency on clouds, I have migrated many of my services to a mini-rack in my apartment running on a few raspberrypi. I have continued to use saltstack to manage it, and have even written a few extensions for better code reuse. Hopefully in the future I will even have test cases.

To reduce some dependency on big tech, I have been migrating more from GitHub to Codeberg for my public projects. For my private projects I have my Forgejo instance, though I have moved more things private due to excessive bot scraping.

Blog

While I did write more articles this year than last year , it was not a signficant amount. All my posts are written in markdown, so writing shouldn’t be affected by my blog software, but continuous background disappointment in Hugo may have delayed me writting more posts. I would like to share more interesting posts I read, but the current Hugo setup adds enough friction that I am less likely to follow through. I have started migrating some of my other sites to use my Markdown Virtual Table project, so maybe it’s time to migrate the rest of the blog as well.