I figured I’d do a super quick update on what I’ve been up to lately, and what I’m hoping to do this year.

Work

I haven’t mentioned it here yet, but I officially joined Instagram in February! I’m working in a small team called IG Labs that is based out of the Meta office in Tokyo, building experimental new features for the Instagram iOS app. So far I’ve been having an absolutely fantistic time at the company. The company has done a fantastic job at writing code for the app frictionless, and the company culture is amazing. I spent a large part of 2021 preparing for the interviews, and when I have a bit more free time, I’ll talk about my journey to Instagram in another blog post. But in any case, I feel really fortunate to have started such an amazing new opportunity. And I’m hoping with this new work-life balance, I’ll be able to focus more time on my own projects as well.

iComics 2

So. Yeah. iComics 2 progress has been pretty slow. The reason for this is that I’ve come up against an engineering challenge that made me stuck pretty badly. I’ve been R&Ding a solution to this problem since 2020, and I THINK I’ve nearly solved the problem.

To quickly sum up the problem. The resolution of comic pages has steadily been growing over the years. When I first started iComics 1, most comic book pages had resoltutions of 1,000×1,500, which was really manageable. Nowadays, most comics are at least 3,000×4,500, and I’ve even seen some comics on Humble Bundle go as high as 9,000×14,000!

At the moment, iComics 1 just uses the regular iOS graphics system to extract the page from the ZIP file, and display it on screen with zero processing. Since iOS itself is built on top a 3D graphics engine, just like in video games, when super large images are shrunk to fit the screen of smaller devices (like an iPod touch), they start to look really “shimmery”.

Here’s an example of what a large image looks when shrunk down.

Now, the obvious solution to solve this would be to make a copy of the image and shrink it down to the same size as an iPod screen. However, if the user wanted to pinch in at all from that size, the image will be super blurry. To solve this, I’d need extra copies of the image at bigger sizes I could snap to as the user pinches.

And it turns out this was totally a solved problem in 3D video games all this time. I’d somehow arrived at the concept of mipmapping in a very roundabout way.

Unfortunately, UIKit, iOS’s main graphics API doesn’t support mipmapping to this level of control. And so after several months of research, I built a proof-of-concept of a mipmapped texture that solved the problem directly on top of Metal, Apple’s lowlevel graphics API.

Here’s how it’s looking now.

This is still a WIP however, and I’m still not 100% convinced this will do the job. But if I can successfully get this running in iComics 2, that will be the biggest hurdle I need to clear before launching it. Either way, I’m really excited about it.

iComics 1

For the record, I stand with Ukraine. Earlier in the year, I pulled iComics from the Russian App Store, and I donated about $500USD to the Ukraine. If you have any money to spare, I would encourage you to do the same.

I really want to do one more big push on iComics 1 and deliver a pile of the features I’ve promised as a final “hoorah” before committing fully to iComics 2. I’ve got dual page spread working in the app already, however, I wasn’t able to get my mipmapping solution I mentioned above working in such an old codebase.

Thankfully, for iComics 1, since it won’t need Mac support, I think I can create a modified version of the mipmapping system that will do the job “good enough” for dual page spread’s needs, and saving the ultra good stuff for iComics 2.

I’ll continue to stream working on iComics 1 code on Twitch. Please feel free to follow me and come say hi over at http://twitch.tv/timXD!

This Blog

I’ve been thinking about this lately. This blog is coming up on 10 years with its current appearence and I’m starting to think it’s time for a change. A big reason why I don’t blog a lot is because of the amount of “friction” I have when writing posts. I always have to Photoshop some kind of banner image, and WordPress, while great, can be quite slow to run at times. And since I’m running a self-hosted instance of WordPress, there is a fair bit of maintenance overhead, constantly installing security updates, and verifying all my plugins are still working.

Since I’m really only serving static content on this blog, I’m considering migrating the whole lot to Jekyll. I’ll try and keep all of the current content and functionality (Including comments via Disqus!), so please stay tuned for that.

And on that note, have a fantastic May!

2021 was a very interesting year. In stark contrast to 2020, we pretty much knew what to expect at this point, and so while we were all still bogged down for most of the year, at least had a lot more knowledge on how to be careful at this point.

I returned back to Japan in January 2021, and after spending 2020 in Perth, Tokyo was an insanely different beast in 2021.

I basically never left the house for the first half of 2021. I ordered all my groceries online, and wore N95 masks out when I had to pay bills. I exercised by playing Ring Fit Adventure on my Switch, and only went for walks late at night. As someone with asthma, I was extremely scared of catching COVID-19, and potentially having to deal with the Japanese medical system if it got very serious. I really respect people who move overseas from work. It’s very easy to lose control of the situation sometimes, and it’s something I’m always very wary of.

I can definitely say, as nice as working from home is, after you’re cooped up indoors for a few months, I found myself pining to go back to an office. One thing I never really appreciated in offices was all of the “friendly” chat that occurred there. When working remotely, there’s never really a chance for a casual chat with coworkers; it’s always 100% business all the time and this sometimes makes team dynamics extremely tricky. I honestly think hybrid is the best way to go.

In the middle of the year, I very thankfully was able to get vaccinated with 2 doses of the Moderna vaccine, and while I did become a bit more relaxed with going outside, Japan’s constant States of Emergencies basically kept us all inside until the end of the year anyway. So, all in all, living in Tokyo in 2021, was extremely quiet.

But. As interesting as living in Japan was this year, most importantly, I didn’t catch COVID-19. Or if I did, I was thankfully protected enough that I didn’t even notice. And that alone is my happiest goal achieved of the year.

I feel like I didn’t achieve as much as I wanted to this year, but given the circumstances, I’m still very happy with what I managed to do.

There were some amazing highlights this year:

• Despite all of the various travel restrictions, I managed to make it back to Japan. My friends did a fantastic job at looking after the place while I was away.
• Set up a really nice home office and gaming set-up in my apartment.
• Finally met my coworkers in person after working remotely for 6 months.
• MC’d iOS Conf SG 2021 remotely from my apartment.
• Ran some more workshops for try! Swift World, and helped MC the WWDC after-party event.
• Finally solved a texture filtering challenge in iComics that had been plaguing me for TWO YEARS.
• MC’d NSSpain 2021 for the APAC region.
• Finally repaired the broken iPhone 5s I had all this time.
• In the brief period at the end of the year, took a quick trip to actually enjoy Japan.
• Continued developing my career (More on that later!)

I feel like I got some good momentum going at the end of the year, and I want to carry this forward into 2022. Some goals I want to aim for:

• Continue going to the gym more often. I started getting back into the pattern towards the end of the year, and I think I can continue that.
• Ship one more “last hoorah” update for iComics before I move fully onto iComics 2.
• Ship the MVP of iComics 2 before iComics 10-year anniversary next year.
• Find out how to record my singing in Tokyo. I found at least 1 studio near my house, but due to the pandemic, it’s still looking somewhat tricky.
• Play more games. I’m still trying to work out how to balance my free time between exercise, iComics and games. But I’m making progress.
• Stream more. Streaming is really fun for me, especially when buddies come in to say hi, and I want to do more of it.
• Enjoy Japan more. One thing that’s really easy to forget when actually living here.
• Return the Australia to see my family. Whenever that might be.

I hope 2022 will be better than these last 2 years. I’m cautiously optimistic that we’re nearing the end of the pandemic, but at the same time, I’m also still treating it very seriously. And I’d encourage everyone else to do the same.

I’m very much looking forward to everything going back to normal. However much longer that might take.

In any case, thanks for reading this far. I hope you also had a safe 2021, and are excited about 2022 as well.

Happy New Year! All the best!

35. What a milestone! I can definitely no longer say I’m in my early thirties. I’m still trying to process it haha.

I had a very quiet 35th birthday. I talked to my family on voice chat, and had dinner with some Tokyo friends in the evening. All in all, it was a very lovely day.

There’s not a lot I can say I did this year. I came back to Japan in January when the travel ban for residents finally lifted, and the country basically went back into lockdown right after that. I stayed in my apartment for the vast majority of the year, and it was such a relief to be able to get vaccinated in the middle of the year.

Work progressed really well this year. I’m really grateful I joined a company who took the pandemic seriously and let us work from home the entire year. I do have to say after 2 years of working from home that I am absolutely looking forward to going to work at an office again.

There were a few fantastic iOS conferences this year. I was honoured to come back and help run iOS Conf SG, try! Swift and NSSpain this year. I’m super hopeful that next year is when we’ll start to see conferences back in person.

Work on iComics progressed decently. I was able to ship a few updates that fixed some of the most egregious bugs that have come up recently. On iComics 2’s front, I’m doing a lot of R&D to finalise solutions to most of the foundational issues iComics has. Namely balancing loading image files on different threads without exhausting system memory. While I don’t have a lot to show, I am VERY excited by what I learned this year.

In any case, kind of like what I said last year. It’s possible to lose a lot in a pandemic, so as long as nothing drastically changed, I’d be happy. And that’s exactly what happened.

As for next year, I’m still deciding what I want to spend the year doing. There’s a lot of exciting change in the wind, especially now the pandemic is winding down, so either way, I think it’s going to be a helluva year.

Thanks again for reading my posts! See you next time!

Like I joked with a lot of my buddies on the day, I feel like I want a do-over for being 33. I want my money back. XD

All jokes aside, this year was an absolutely surreal event. If I told myself this time last year what would be happening now, I absolutely would not have believed it.

At this point, everything I had planned back in January 2020 has fallen through. I left Tokyo and got stuck out of Japan, Google Tokyo rescinded my job offer, and in the chaos, all my side project plans fell to the wayside while I had to figure out what I was going to do for 2021.

But while on a purely professional year, 2020 “failed to meet expectations”, I’m extremely thankful that myself and my friends and family in the world have weathered this crazy time (relatively) unscathed. And for all that, while I will always be disappointed about the year, I also thoroughly appreciate that none of this stuff even matters in the end.

On the plus side, something I very much appreciated this year was how well everyone kept in touch, despite the circumstances. Even though I’ve been stuck indoors all year, with all of the virtual conferences and meetups this year, it definitely didn’t feel isolating at all. I had the honour of being invited to MC or present at a lot of events this year, and I am so profoundly grateful for the opportunity, as well as to help contribute some positivity into the world.

I actually hope that moving forward, we can potentially keep meetups and conferences as online as we did this year, as it certainly makes them accessible to a huge range of people who might not be able to afford to fly out to these things.

And on a personal note, it’s been lovely being back in Perth this year. I’d certainly felt quite detached from friends and family with my working hours over in Japan, and getting this “reset” this year was something I didn’t even realise I noticed.

Anyway, normally at this point, I try and lay out some goals for myself in the next year. In 2019, I was super excited at quitting my job at Mercari and starting a new decade fresh. But given the circumstances, moving forward for now, I’m going to operate with extremely conservative optimism.

Honestly. If everything just stays the way it is now, I will be extremely happy with that. That is all I need.

Here’s hoping things will be looking up for everyone soon. It was not the best of years, but I’m confident we’re nearing the end, and brighter days are on the horizon.

Thanks for reading. Stay safe! And here’s to next year!

It was at this moment that I remembered I had a blog.

So, it’s been a while! I hope everyone’s been doing really well. As well as is possible in the circumstances. A lot’s happened this year, hasn’t it.

My last post on this thing was at the start of this year. Back before the craziness started. It feels like I wrote that post in another life at this point. I figured I’d do a quick update on where I’m at and what I’m up to. Things certainly didn’t go the way I had planned this year. Not at all.

If you want a TL;DR: Nothing went to plan this year lol. As such, I didn’t get anywhere as much work on iComics 2 done as I wanted. But things are finally back on track, and I couldn’t be happier.

It’s probably worth a blog post on its own, but long story short, late last year, I received hiring approval by Google to join their Tokyo office as a senior UX engineer of iOS. The concept behind this job sounded amazing, as it wasn’t directly related to any specific Google products, but more involved work with designers and UX researchers to prototype new UI concepts. Given how much I absolutely love simply tinkering with the UI on iOS, this position sounded like an absolute dream. Sadly, I was told I had just missed the cut-off for 2019, so I would need to wait until 2020 when the hiring head-counts for next year were decided.

I had more or less finished up with everything else I wanted to do at my current company at the time, and so I made the decision that I would resign at the end of 2019, and herald in the start of the new decade with a completely clean slate. This also meant I could have some time resetting from that company, and some time to work on iComics 2. Sounded perfect.

And then COVID-19 happened.

For all of January and February, my friends and I in Japan didn’t pay much attention to it. We saw SARS in the early 2000’s and assumed it would play out the same way. We’d hear about it on the news, and not pay it much mind.

And then the Diamond Princess happened. Extremely close to where myself and some friends were working out of Yokohama at the time. And suddenly the virus became very very real.

To Japan’s credit, the people started taking it extremely seriously, before even the government did. Even as early as February, immediately, all of the meetup events I was attending started to hand out free masks and sanitiser. Certain conferences that were already locked in for Feb continued, however all of the social parts were canceled, and they mandated a mask. Starting in March, every conference (including try! Swift Tokyo; one I was personally involved with) was promptly canceled. (At the time, it could have been argued it was premature, but looking back, that was 100% the right call.)

At that point, seeing that the virus had reached my doorstep that quickly, it suddenly became a lot more serious than I had ever expected. And so with the urging of my parents, I made the decision to return to Perth temporarily at the start of March. With Perth being far smaller than Tokyo, I figured it would be a wise move to stop there for a little while, where social distancing is far easier, and I could plan my next moves based on what happened.

It’s probably worth another blog post on its own, but the plane ride home from Japan was very interesting. I had seen Japan was taking COVID-19 extremely seriously for over a month at that point, but when I arrived in Sydney, it was absolutely normal. The sheer differences in the responsiveness by the people between these two countries was astonishing. In any case, when I got home, while it wasn’t mandatory at that time yet, I voluntarily self-isolated for 2 weeks away from my parents. I managed to completely 100% Death Stranding in that time. Worth it. XD

Sadly, right after I finished my quarantine, Australia enacted a travel ban preventing Australians leaving. And then right after that, Japan enacted their own travel ban preventing Australians from entering.

So before I even realised it, I had became stuck in Australia a little longer than I was expecting.

In any case, I brought enough of my tech back from Japan with me to let me continue to work on a lot of cool projects throughout the year.

1. I helped contribute to osu!framework, including researching and implementing a variety of compatibility fixes for iPhone and iPad.
2. I laid the groundwork for iComics 2 and managed to start getting specific portions (like the thumbnails engine) working.
3. I spent a lot of time considering the design of iComics 2. I did a LOT of sketching and several mockups in Photoshop.
4. I ran several workshops for try! Swift World, and MC’d one of their social hour events.
5. I produced a blog on behalf some of my SF startup buddies and their crazy awesome new product.
6. I got back into Destiny 2, and have been having a fantastic time playing on it with my Perth buddies.

Throughout the first half of the year, I kept in regular touch with Google. They told me that the pandemic had indeed affected their hiring headcount for the year, and would let me know more once they knew more.

Sadly, in May, I finally received some terrible news from them. Due to the pandemic and their subsequent economic downturn, the headcount for my role at Google Tokyo was rescinded, basically finalising that my job at Google straight up wasn’t going to happen in 2020. They said they would still keep me on the list in the long term for when the role might potentially come back, but could neither promise when, or even if that would happen.

Obviously it’s hard to overstate how disappointing that was. I had already overcome all of the hardest parts of applying to Google, but then something no one could have anticipated came out of nowhere and completely derailed it. And granted, given how deadly this pandemic has tragically turned out worldwide, if that’s the worst I personally get affected by it, then that’s okay. On the bright side, I’ll always be proud of the fact I managed to make it that far, and I’ve already re-purposed the code I wrote in that code exam for iComics 2.

That all being said though, the fact remained that in the middle of this year, suddenly I was staring down the barrel of having to look for new work in Japan in the middle of a pandemic, remotely from Perth. No pressure at all, right? XD

After a long chat with my parents, the topic of relocating permanently back from Japan to Australia came up. I certainly felt like I hadn’t fully gotten to enjoy my time in Japan just yet, and was hoping to avoid that if possible. But at the same time, given all the current circumstances, performing a “strategic retreat” to Australia to regroup and recharge for a year also didn’t seem so bad either.

So I set myself a deadline. I’d put out the feelers on LinkedIn, and if a position that looked really appealing appeared before mid-September, I’d stay on in Japan. But if that didn’t happen, then at least I could head back to Australia content that I gave it my best shot.

A lot of people have told me they’d never trust finding a job via LinkedIn. But LinkedIn is where I’ve been approached by recruiters from Google, Facebook, Apple and a lot of other high profile companies before. It is the place to be for recruiting on a global scale. It’s a good place, as long as you’re patient.

I spent most of June, and July talking to many different recruiters, and trying out for a few companies. Sometimes, depending on the company and how far you get, getting rejected can be pretty demoralizing. In one instance, I spent a week building a fully fleshed app as a code challenge, only to have the company respond with “We’ve decided to reject you” with no reason given, and then promptly cutting off all ties. I wasn’t disappointed with that one. More as just really confused as to what I could have done that caused that rejection.

Towards the end, an amazing recruiter named Hiroyuki Komiya reached out to me and said he’d heard there’s a company called Drivemode looking for a senior engineer capable of working in Tokyo. I’d heard of Drivemode previously in the year, and both the role and company looked incredibly appealing to me. The company culture on the website reminded me of my time at Realm in SF, and the fact I had just finished doing a deep dive into Bluetooth for my friend’s blog post meant that my qualifications seemed to line up with what they were looking for in an almost serendipitous way! But I’d been told by another recruiter that Drivemode was probably a no-go since they were really hoping to find someone physically in Tokyo. When I told this to Hiro, he suggested we try anyway, just to see if that really was the case. The worse they could say is “Yes, we’d prefer someone currently in Tokyo”.

But to both of our pleasant surprise, Drivemode was happy to let me start working remotely until I could get back to Tokyo. I had an absolutely amazing chat with all of the execs, and admired the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit they all had in spades. And when I met the CEO, I was amazed to hear we had potentially crossed paths at some of the meetups I attended when I was living in San Francisco in 2017. What a small world!

So after a bit of deliberation, Drivemode made me an offer, and I accepted! I’m starting next week; remotely from Australia at first, but I’ll be heading back to Japan as soon as it becomes possible for me to re-enter. One particular thing I’m really really happy to report: Drivemode was able to confirm that I am allowed to keep working on iComics 2 in my free time, so I won’t have to quit my side projects. I’m super happy about this, since that was always a looming prospect when applying to Google.

This year was certainly one of extreme uncertainty for me. I went from being super excited about all the exciting times ahead in 2020 in January, to having literally no idea what was going to happen beyond May. I’ve certainly learned to appreciate where I came from, and where I’m supposed to be heading this year. But in any case, I’m extremely happy how things turned out and I can’t wait to get back to Tokyo.

So, just to round everything off. I’d like to finish this blog post with a few lessons this year has taught me. I’ll be keeping these in mind moving forward.

1. Never. Jump. The. Gun. When applying for a new job, until you have a signed letter of offer directly in your hands, you should operate under the assumption that it’s not happening.
2. Don’t be too disappointed at job rejections. They can happen for any reason behind the scenes, and sometimes you won’t even be told why. If you know yourself that you tried your absolute best (at that time), you can be satisfied with that and move on to the next.
3. Treat every job application as a chance to learn. Use the code challenges as opportunities to learn or create something new. That way, even if you get rejected, you still learned something.
4. Never preemptively assume the answer is “no”. I passed on a lot of interesting looking roles on LinkedIn because I thought “Nah, they probably wouldn’t be interested in me.”. It NEVER hurts to simply try. The worst that’ll happen is they’ll actually just say no.
5. It’s never a bad move to ask for help. Everyone’s in the same boat, and everyone understands. Just make sure to help pass that help forward in future.
6. Always have a backup plan. No matter how set in stone something is, it’s certainly a good idea to have something else to fall back on. Because you never know when a pandemic could appear out of no where.

Anyway, thanks for reading! I’ll try and do an update post on iComics 2 next!

While my parents came to visit last time, I was expecting this one to be really quiet. Maybe a nice dinner with friends, but not even any cake.

But my crazy and lovely coworkers had other plans. XD

They decided to set up a surprise birthday cake in the kitchen of our office, and then invite me over from my desk. Only thing was, they didn’t expect me to accidentally walk into them on my way to a vending machine.

I just walked past them, giving them a casual glance…

Before twigging on what was actually happening. XD

The cake was delicious. And I was completely unsurprised by the name on it. XD

I’m really grateful that my coworkers went out of their way for me like this. I was really touched. ^_^

I had a lot of hope for this year to be a good one, but that sadly didn’t turn out to be the case. At the very start of the year, our beautiful puppy of 17 years took a turn for the worst and we had to say our goodbyes to her. It’s been 11 months later now and I’m still no where near over it.

I’d always thought I’d have enough time to fly back to Perth when Nicky’s time came, but it happened all too soon. As a result, I’ve been questioning if coming to Japan was the right choice all year. As a result of that, this year’s been a lot lower for me than I was hoping. I’ll definitely get better with time, but it’s not going to happen soon. Thankfully, many of my friends in Japan have gone out of their way to look after me this year, and I’m very grateful for that.

That stuff aside, this was the first year where I spent an entire year in Japan, and it’s been absolutely wild. Having a fully set up Japanese apartment has been amazing, with all the facilities I need to stream video games and work on my side projects. And after saying “I’ll get around to it” for so long, I also finally worked out how to join a gym in Japan.

So for all the negative things that sadly happened this year, I think I’m slowly but surely starting to make progress in all of the things I am setting out to achieve.

Like I do every year, I’m going to reflect on some of the great things that I was able to do as a 32 year old.

• The anime project in which I sang was aired on TV and Netflix over in Japan. It was ABSOLUTELY SURREAL to hear the song in the context of the show. Also the signs around Tokyo. XD
• While none of the footage I was in was actually used, I was very lucky to help a friend in shooting an Apple Developer Stories video that was showcased at all the Apple Stores in the world.
• I was very lucky to be invited by Google to come visit their Roppongi office for several meetups JUST before they were retired and the company left the area.
• I was very lucky to be invited back to MC try! Swift Tokyo once more. I had a total blast and made so many more friends this time.
• I was able to start streaming a lot more regularly.
• I managed to beat the odds and attend WWDC in person once more! I even got to see the new Mac Pro!
• Discovered that since Realm is used in the Shortcuts app, some of my code was BRIEFLY shipped within iOS itself. XD
• I shipped a variety of libraries in preparation for iComics, including a new reachability scanner, a new alert popup and a controversial rounded button.
• I was invited out to Bangalore and present at Swift India. I had an absolute blast!
• I attended the annual spicy festival again and regretted everything twice in one evening.
• I delivered two presentations and briefly help MC at /dev/world/ in Melbourne.
• I got to visit New York and attend the try! Swift there for the first time. I can definitely see why people love New York!
• Traveled to a lovely Japanese inn with friends in the Kobe mountains.

Through all the good and the bad, sometimes the important thing is to just keep smiling.

2020 is a very special milestone. It’s a whole new decade, and I can’t decide if that’s amazing, or terrifying. I definitely think this is the time when it’s best to make a fresh start on a lot of things, and so I’m already making plans to some amazing things next year.

Some of the things I want to focus on next year:

• Spend maybe 1 more year in Japan and see how we go.
• Make a serious push on updating iComics in preparation of iComics 2.
• Do more video game streaming. Aiming for Twitch Partner! XD
• Keep it up at the gym and lose a bit more weight.
• Find a much more sustainable balance between work and life.

In any case, I’m grateful for the good times I had in 2019. It was certainly a year that changed a lot of the perspectives that I had, and maybe that’s a good thing in preparation of 2020.

In any case, here’s hoping for a fantastic 33!

We originally welcomed Nicky to the family back in 2002, back when I was still in high school. Mum and Dad had promised my sister that if she did exceptionally well in her studies, they would consider getting a dog. And she certainly held them to that.

I had literally no say in the matter. I hadn’t even heard about the discussion beforehand. On the day the family went to the pet store, I was at a friend’s birthday party. When I got home that evening, all the lights were off, but I noticed there was a mysterious cardboard box next to the dining room table.

When I asked “Woah. What is this?”, my sister whispered “We got a puppy!”. I peered into the dark box, and all I could see was a small ball of white fur, breathing slowly. I was like “What?!”, and she said “Her name is Nicky” (Though I thought she said Ninky at the time).

I had a very short response.

“FUCK!!”

I didn’t want a dog! Those things are awful! They chew up your things and they piss on the carpet and they make a lot of noise. Gah!

And that evening, Nicky didn’t even do anything to help herself. She was still nervous after coming to a new home, so in the middle of the night, I got woken up to the sound of her yipping and trying to jump out of the box. I went to try and calm her down, but mum basically said we can’t do anything but leave her in the box for now. Thankfully she calmed down and we were all able to go back to sleep.

The next day, I got to meet Nicky properly. She was still a puppy then, a tiny little Bichon Frise cross Toy Poodle breed. Apparently when at the pet store, my sister took a liking to her because she was accosting the other puppies in the play pen. My sister said “she had spunk”.

In any case, after getting to hold Nicky for the first time, I fell in love with her. She was very soft and fluffy and incredibly playful. She was an incredibly kind dog. Not once in her life did she ever get angry or bite anything aggressively.

There were a lot of growing pains in the first few years. When she was teething, she chewed up all of the remote controls for the TVs, which pissed me off. And at the start she wasn’t toilet trained, so she once ran behind the TV setup and pooped all over the curtains, which also pissed Dad off.

She hated being left alone. Whenever we would leave the house, she would run outside, stand at the gate and bark at people walking by. It would annoy the neighbors a fair bit. Whenever only one of us was home, Nicky would usually follow us around and lie down for a sleep when were sitting.

Whenever anyone would come home, Nicky would be over the moon. She’d run up to greet them, and if she hadn’t seen them in a particularly long time (my sister and I have lived in other countries multiple times), she would also sometimes start wailing and crying as she was running towards us. The cutest thing in the world.

My family periodically goes out and stays in a house in the WA countryside. I always love these trips because I can take my laptop and do some coding/TV watching in absolute peace. Invariably, when everyone else in the house left to go outside, and I’d still be inside coding, Nicky would race into the room, jump up onto the couch next to me, and promptly go to sleep. This usually totally disrupted my peace and quiet because she was an incredibly loud snorer!

She loved guests. There was not a single person Nicky didn’t like. Whenever a guest came over, Nicky would try and impress them by grabbing the closest piece of fabric nearby (clothing, a hat, a cushion), run over to the person and then whip the fabric around as if trying to kill it. She’d then proudly present her fresh kill to the guest.

While the initial plan was for Nicky to sleep on her own bed, this fell through very quickly. For her entire life, Nicky slept in one of our beds, usually either my sister or my parents. Usually once everyone else got up, I’d still be sleeping in, and so she’d come into my room and let herself into my bed. I’d usually end up going to school/uni with a dog still snoring in my sheets.

One time, as the family was all going away on a trip, Nicky went to stay with my grandmother. The plan was to have Nicky sleep in her basket for the entire time, but when it was time for bed, she completely disappeared inside grandma’s house.

Grandma was completely flabbergasted when she finally found Nicky. She had somehow managed to get INTO grandma’s bed, working her way under the covers without it becoming untucked, with her head on grandma’s pillow, snoring soundly by the time grandma managed to find her. Suffice it to say, grandma was not impressed at how we had raised our dog.

For a dog who slept a lot, Nicky was also crazy active. She would be over the moon whenever Dad got home from work. They’d both run into the backyard and dad would kick a basketball or a football around on the ground and Nicky would chase after it in fevered glee. Dad would usually have to end the session because it would be obvious that Nicky would continue to play well beyond her physical limits.

Sometimes Dad and I would put a net up in the backyard to play badminton. This was apparently sheer torture for Nicky because whenever we’d play, she’d be stuck inside the house, staring through the glass door, shrieking and howling and batting at the door with her paw, wanting to come out and join us. We’d eventually relent and let her come out to join us, but this would also add an extra level of difficulty to the game. For if we let a shuttlecock hit the ground, Nicky would race over and pick it up in her mouth, crushing it in the process. We eventually set up a system where we used feathered shuttlecocks for our games, and vinyl ones to let Nicky join in the fun.

Even though as far as dogs go, Nicky was exceptionally clean, she was still very much a dog. Sometimes, when mum and dad fed her too big of a bone at dinner, she would take it outside and bury it in the yard. A few days later, she would dig it up and bring it back into the house, dirt and all. She would then try and find a place to bury it in the house, but when she couldn’t find a suitable place, she’d get very agitated and start making a whimpering noise. This would usually trigger the rest of us to get the bone off her, because if we didn’t, we would later discover it inside a shoe, or one of our beds.

Possibly my father’s favorite moment about Nicky was one morning when she dug up a bone from the yard. I was still asleep in my bed when Nicky dashed into my room, jumped onto my bed, and upchucked the bone right on the pillow next to my face. I was still half asleep so all I remember is the sound of whimpering, some kind of gagging noise, then a “PUFF” noise as something hit the pillow next to me.

Dad says he recalls coming in to wake me up, only to find me in bed, holding the bone, squinting at it, trying to come back to consciousness and work out what just happened. He absolutely lost it.

Another of dad’s favorite moments with the dog (Again, because I suffered) happened a few years later. As she grew older, Nicky started to develop a cyst on her back. While we thought it was too deep to do anything without a trip to the vet, one day, I saw Nicky just reach around and bite it, rupturing it. Later that evening, mum and dad left the house to go to a party (And my sister was away from home at the time) leaving just me and Nicky in the house. The cyst looked like it was oozing slightly, so I decided to disinfect it with some rubbing alcohol. Before I applied it, I decided to squeeze the cyst to try and clean it out first.

That was a huge mistake.

I didn’t even squeeze it that hard, but there was enough pressure in the cyst for it to explode, splattering my face, pieces lodged in my beard, and barely missing my eyes. I think my response was pretty appropriate:

“BLAARGHHBGGFJHDGFHGF WWWAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!”

I moved Nicky to the laundry since I needed to give her a proper wash now, and then jumped into the shower and scrubbed my face very vigorously.

Dad was two houses down, but he could sense something had happened. It was very unusual for all of the lights in our house to be on. He sent me a message asking if I was okay and I sent the following.

Dad had to leave the party early because he couldn’t stop laughing. Everyone thought he had gone insane.

As smart as she was, Nicky also had some quirky behaviours that we just couldn’t work out. One of them was that she periodically liked to drink shower water. We couldn’t understand why; maybe she just preferred a different “vintage” than that of her normal water bowl. But whatever the case, she would periodically jump into the shower after someone had used it and start lapping up the puddle in it. The only problem was, once she had jumped in, she was too terrified to jump back out. Maybe she realised her feet were wet and slippery, or maybe the view was just different from the other side.

Whatever the case, sometimes, we’d randomly start hearing crying and howling coming from the bathroom, and when we went to investigate, this is what we would find:

Thankfully, a few years later, we moved to a house that didn’t have a ledge at the bottom of the shower, and Nicky was fine after that.

Nicky loved attention. Whenever someone was sitting on a couch, she would come along, jump up on the couch, and lie along with them. If the person on the couch started stroking Nicky, and then stopped, she would get agitated about that. She’d start batting you with her paw until you started stroking her again. She was really quite shameless in demanding attention.

One thing Nicky absolutely hated above all else, was being cold. While it was easy enough to get into someone’s bed at night time, often during winter, she’d be cold during the daytime and evenings as well.

As such, it was extremely common to see Nicky sleeping in the sunlight during the day.

And then during those cold winter nights, Dad would always build a raging log fire. We were absolutely dumbfounded that Nicky would lie point blank in front of it for a hilarious amount of time, to the point where it would be physically painful for us to touch her fur because it was too hot.

After usually an hour or two, enough for a human to suffer second degree burns, Nicky would eventually realise she borderline cooked herself, and while panting furiously, would waddle over to her water bowl, drink nearly the whole thing, and then plop down at her previous position in front of the fireplace.

Finally, Nick always loved going for walks. It got to the point where we had to talk about walking, we’d have to spell ‘W-A-L-K’ (or say another word, like ‘perambulation’), because merely breathing the word would put Nicky into an absolute frenzy. We’d always walk a similar route, and Nicky would take it upon herself to rush up to and sniff the same posts the same time. I’m assuming that was the equivalent of doggy social media.

Nicky didn’t change the whole time she was was with us. She was a super energetic bundle of fur who would also dash up to greet us when we entered the house, and was always down for a game of chasey, or fetch.

When I left for Japan again in January last month, I gave her a very quick goodbye pat and told her I’d see her in a few months when I would be back for the next holiday. I had no idea I was giving her my final pats.

It all happened so quickly. A week after I left, she started experiencing seizures every evening. Each seizure weakened her further, and within the space of just over 2 weeks, she went from being perfectly normal and energetic, to being completely unable to walk. It was at this point that we had to make the difficult decision to send her on her way.

I was not prepared for this. I had always assumed that when it was Nicky’s time, it would be slow and very obvious from a long time coming. Enough for me to drop what I was doing and fly back so I could say goodbye. This ended up not being the case, and it’s something I’m still trying to come to grips with now. It happened all too quickly for me to process.

There’s a huge doggy shaped crater in our family now, and it’s going to take us a very long time for us to finally come to grips with it. My parents are saying the house feels so much more empty, and my sister keeps jokingly saying “lousy, lovable dog”.

Life moves in mysterious ways. At the very least, we should be very grateful we were able to spend 17 wonderful years with Nicky. She was 100% a dedicated member of our family and we all loved her very very much. As painful as it is now, we’re at least relieved she’s not in pain anymore and is in peace.

It definitely goes to show that you should never take anything for granted. Because it can be gone in the blink of an eye. If anyone reading this has a beloved pet of their own, please give them a big hug for me, and make sure you treasure every moment with them.

Thank you for everything Nicky. I love you.

I wrote last time that 2017 was a pretty cautious one for me. I suddenly needed to find new work completely without warning, and I also learned that my health was a lot more worse than I had realised. All in all, 2017 didn’t end all that well for me, but at least I knew what the stakes were.

2018 has been an incredibly interesting set of new challenges. I moved to a country that speaks a different language to me, and I went from an extremely small company to an incredibly large one.

That all being said, I think I’m happy with the way 2018 came out. I’m incredibly happy I’m in a position where I can continue doing what I love and contributing to a community of incredibly talented and lovely people.

But on that note, if there was one downside to 2018, it was that due to the move, the first half of the year was a bit of a write-off. Getting set up in a new country takes time, and so all the time spent getting an apartment and furniture and setting up the utilities was time I couldn’t spend working on my side projects. Granted, all things considered, I think that was a reasonable trade-off.

I’m saying that, because now that that is all taken care of, I think I’m extra excited for 2019. This will be the first year in a while where I haven’t been constantly uprooting and relocating myself and I’m really excited for this.

Like I do every year, here are some of the goals I’m setting myself for this year.

• I still need to focus on my health. At least now that I’m in one place, I can look at signing up for a proper gym.
• I plan to stream a lot more of my work and gameplay on Twitch. I don’t think I’ll spring for affiliate, but if I ever hit Partner numbers, we’ll see.
• I made some great progress on the file downloader for iComics, but it’s still miles away. I really want to finish it this time.
• I said last time that I want to do more with my singing than just karaoke. I’m making some progress on that, but we’ll see.
• I definitely want to maintain a proper work-life balance. This can be really hard to do in Japan sometimes, but I think I can make it work.
• I definitely want to make more time for hanging out with friends, especially those coming to visit or who already live in Japan.
• I want to have a happy, healthy year.

If you got this far, I hope you had a happy 2018 and are excited for 2019 as well.

Let’s make it a good one. Happy new year!

My parents and sister flew out from Australia to come spend my birthday with me. That photo above is from the restaurant we went to. It was an excellent time and one that touched me more than I expected.

Like I said last year, while 30 was certainly a milestone, 32 feels it’s just another stepping stone on the way to getting to say “Oh god. Make it stop” more often. The next sealstone will be 35. (Assuming I live that long! )

This was an absolutely insane year. Absolutely insane. Last year, at the time I wrote my 31st blog post, I literally had no idea whatsoever of where I was going to end up. Absolutely none of this was planned in the slightest. I had no idea I was going to wind up in Japan.

It’s been a whole year since this roller coaster started, and while I’ve kept it pretty quiet this year, now that some time has passed, I’m going to start talking about what actually happened.

In September of last year, quite out of the blue, Realm decided they needed to go in a different direction, and as a result of wanting to operate in a more lean capacity, they spent the next few months laying off more than half the company. Myself included.

It sucked. It really sucked.

I knew when I was getting into the startup scene, these things could happen. The wind can change at any moment. What threw me for a loop was how fast it actually happened. One day I had a job, the next day I didn’t.

This put me in a position I hadn’t been in for a long time: I had no idea what to do next. Absolutely none. It’s a terrifying feeling and something that makes me never want to take anything for granted ever again.

Realm had been really good to me in that it let me work remotely in Perth. I kind of wanted to stay in Perth. Despite popular opinion, Perth is actually a nice place. But while the startup scene in Perth has been making extremely impressive strides in recent times, there didn’t seem to be anything there at the time that would let me scratch the same itch as Realm.

I was considering a few companies in the Bay Area. I interviewed at Apple, and I considered applying to Twitch. But all things considered, while it is quite nice to live in the U.S, the vast difference in time zone meant I could never easily keep in touch with Perth friends, and it felt quite lonely.

By a turn of luck, one of my old friends from my pixiv times in Tokyo came to SF while I was there and we agreed to catch up for a drink. During the evening, he offered “Why not come check out my company Mercari? We’re like Silicon Valley, but in Tokyo”.

I was tempted. Extremely tempted. Also a bit skeptical, but I figured it was at least worth a shot.

So in October of last year, I applied to the company. And when I wrote my birthday blog last year, I had just finished my final interview in Tokyo, but hadn’t received an offer yet.

Suffice it to say, I did get an offer a few days later. And I accepted it.

As a result of that though, like I said above, the next 8 months or so after that have been chaos. The next 2 months would be getting ready to leave Perth, and the next 5 months would be spent rotating places in Japan, living out of a suitcase, until I found somewhere more permanent.

For the longest while, all of my free time was spent simply “getting set up”, and so it sadly meant that all of the stuff I do in my free time (iComics, my libraries, even gaming to an extent) had to sit on the back-burner for a while.

In any case, it’s been a long time, but I’ve finally managed to get set up and settled in that I can finally start putting real time back into all of my side projects, and for that, I am now extremely excited.

Like I do every year, I thought I’d make a list of some of the cool things I got to do as a 31 year old.

• I helped record some vocals for a soundtrack for an upcoming anime coming out in 2019.
• I got to finally try recording and publishing a tech video to YouTube.
• I accepted a job at one of Japan’s leading startup companies and relocated to Tokyo.
• For the first time ever, I got to be an MC and help run the try! Swift Tokyo conference.
• I was able to finally visit lots of Japanese conventions for the first time, including Tokyo Game Show and BitSummit.
• I was able to visit a lot of famous Japanese company headquarters, including LINE, CyberAgent and DeNA.
• I managed to score a WWDC ticket two years in a row and represent my company over in San Jose.
• I helped my company be a sponsor for /dev/world/2018 and had a blast experiencing the conference from a completely different angle.
• I discovered that my cropper library itself was now being adopted by Google in the official iOS Drive app.
• I was lucky enough to be MC once more at the Mercari Tech Conference this year!
• I received an award at work for being one of the most unconventional employees (I THINK that’s good. XD)
• Finally got into a position where I can stream on a regular basis.
• I finally built the perfect home office. With Nintendo Switch/Mac/PC support, as well as standing.

While maybe not as amazing as 2017 where I got to visit the Pokémon headquarters or anything, I think it’s still been an extremely exciting and enlightening year. It was definitely a slight step back due to the sheer amount of effort relocating, but still good.

There’s a lot of things I still want to do and I don’t think I’ll get to them this year.

• Focus more on health. Moving country, setting up a new home, adapting to a new job, and working out a health balance has been ‘interesting’. I’ve nearly decided on a gym at this point.
• Do more with my singing. I’d love to do more than the occasional karaoke screaming session, but I’m still not even sure where to begin there.

In any case, I still have a lot of things to work on. 31 was definitely a bit slower while I had to stop and reset everything, but now that’s all done, I’m extremely excited for level 32. XD

I know these blogs are pretty cheesy, but if you got this far, thanks so much again.

-Tim

2017 is done and dusted. What a ride that was. A few years ago, I called 2015 a transformative year for me. While I’d like to call this year transformative too, I think it was more ‘enlightening’.

This year, I think I had both the best time, and also possibly one of the most challenging times of my life. Moving to America for half of the year, it was not an easy choice to leave Perth and live out of a suitcase for that long. But I was certain that my time would be far better spent over there than in Australia. (And I think I was still right about that. XD)

It was an absolute privilege in what I helped professionally contribute to this year. I traveled to places around the world I never thought I’d visit, and I got to meet a variety of personal heroes that I never EVER thought I’d see. I was able to make so many new friends, and learn so many new things. Truly a privilege that I will always cherish. If anyone else is considering a career in the Silicon Valley area doing the same, I would whole-heartedly recommend it.

But unfortunately. Circumstances can change, sometimes completely out of the blue. For the latter half of the year, my current situation completely changed and all of my plans were thrown out the window. I had no idea what I was going to do, or what would happen to me now. And to boot, I learned that because of my utter disregard for my own health for the last few years, that had taken its toll on me more than I’d noticed. Thankfully, while it came off as absolutely dire initially, it turned out to be more of an ‘urgent fixer-upper’. So of that, I am very thankful.

With all that said, I should definitely say that to everyone I talked to in these past few months, thank you so much for your support. It’s been so fantastic that when I was in a real rut, everyone was so forthcoming and helpful.

In any case, on the twilight of 2018, things are a lot better now. My health (while still WIP) is now under control and I have a clear path for 2018. I’m excited at the potential this coming year will bring.

So to sum that all up, here’s a few lessons I learned this year:

• Don’t forget about your own needs. It’s incredibly important to unplug and relax. It’s not impressive to not do that.
• Don’t forget that if push comes to shove, business is sadly, only business. Going above and beyond the call of duty is sometimes not worth it.
• NOTHING is worth sacrificing your health over. NOTHING. You can make time to go to the gym. You can make time to go for that walk.

In any case, all is good now. I feel a bit wiser, and happy that I learned these lessons at the time I did. For anyone else starting out, I hope you can learn them from someone else before you experience them.

In terms of new year’s resolutions, 2017 was absolutely the worst for me. I got nothing done. Now that my circumstances have changed, I’m going to reset everything and try again.

Resolutions for 2018:

• Get healthy. Lose weight. This time it’s serious.
• Write more blogs. Oh my god. This poor site got NO LOVE this year.
• Play more video games. Seriously, even if I have to take time off iComics.
• Manage my open source libraries better. I tackled support alright this year, but if it gets any more frequent, I might have to start being really strict.
• Ship the files downloader feature in iComics. This bloody thing is 2 years in the making now.
• Stream more on Twitch. I FINALLY got the sweet username I was after. Better not let it go to waste.
• Do more karaoke. And maybe put it on YouTube. XD

I’m not sure if anyone actually reads these, but if you got this far, thank you for indulging me. So long 2017. Let’s rock out in 2018.

Thanks so much for everything.