Hi there 👋

Intro It’s kind of alarming that I don’t really remember much about 2025, so I’m taking the time to actively recall what happened while writing this blog post. Reflection time Thankfully I’ve been somewhat active in writing blog posts, so I could fill the gaps in my memories. Key points of my life during 2025 has been: Purchasing a domain & hosting my personal site, as well as this blog on that domain Learned some react native, but since I never used it I think I already mostly forgot how to use it Used a split keyboard but ended up selling it to a friend Created a personal project (maisocial) but ended up abandoning it due to me quitting maimai Took the N3 JLPT exam on July & ended up passing, so I didn’t take any JLPT test on December Tried applying for a job at PayPay, but ended up getting rejected without even getting an online coding test First time resigning from a job (previously I was laid off) Prepared & ran a 5K with a friend Started spamming chunithm instead of maimai at arcades Joined a rhythm game tournament & ended up top 8 (out of 38 players) A pretty eventful year, I’m satisfied with what I’ve done this year. Now, let’s look at my resolutions last year: ...

Some of my pent up negative feelings have been building up in the background lately, so I needed to get them out for my own sanity. Enshittification It feels like everything is going on a decline lately. I would have loved things to stay the way they are, but companies like to change up stuff for no reason (お金). Browser Google dropped support of Manifest V2 on July 24th, 2025. Unfortunately, uBlock Origin and other adblockers stopped working because of this. Using a browser without an adblock is insanity, so I tried 2 different things: ...

I think I would consider this month an unintentional rest month, due to a combination of factors. Path of Exile 1 3.27.0 update I’m not sure how many people here have played an ARPG like Path of Exile, the closest comparison would be Diablo and Last Epoch. Basically, there is a new season that was released on the 1st of November. With the release of a new season, my seasonal characters are not eligible to play in the new season, so I would have to grind again from the beginning (but that is part of the fun for me). ...

This month’s update is going to focus on the tournament I participated on the 25th of October. ChuniMaiDori Festival 2025 ChuniMaiDori Festival 2025 was the second arcade rhythm game tournament that I joined. The first one was a maimai tournament held in a mall near my place to celebrate the release of maimai DX, and I joined just to get the black gloves from SEGA. This time, I joined for several reasons: ...

A lot has happened since the last update (August 11th, 2025), and I kind of want to write this update to get a few things off my chest. JLPT results out After a lot of trepidation, the JLPT results were announced on the 25th of August, 2025. I scored higher than expected, which makes me glad. I don’t plan on taking the N2 anytime soon though, because I kind of speedran my N3 studies from N4 (December 2024 I took N4, July 2025 I took N3). I want to have a good foundation, because I feel like my main problem is not having a wide vocabulary. ...

Just a small blog update to prove that I am still alive 😆 Stopping MaiSocial I have decided to take down MaiSocial, my personal project. There are several reasons for this, ordered from most influential to least influential: I’m starting to lose interest on the game. My skill is plateauing or even decaying, and I don’t see myself achieving my new year’s resolution target of 15750 rating. The maimai community in Indonesia is mostly dominated by a clan that likes to cause drama everywhere. It would not be a big deal if they’re just players causing problems, but they are quite influential. Arcade staff will definitely side with them instead of other players. Forcing myself to use MongoDB for a social media project that benefits from a relational database is slowly but surely making me go crazy. I could tear it down and make my project use a relational database, but that takes additional time of no visible product progress. I believe that programmers need their own passion project to work on, so that their skills don’t atrophy & not lose the joy of programming from endless hours of corporate programming. I plan on making a new personal project, but it is probably very far from completion. ...

Background This is another update of my current hobby project. You can read the previous parts here: MaiSocial - Part 1 (Backend & Frontend initialization) MaiSocial - Part 2 (Comment section, Google SSO) MaiSocial - Part 3 (WebP, romaji search) I had some spare time during a sprint, so I decided to work on my personal project a bit. The feature I wanted to make is a playlist feature, where users can create playlists & can share them publicly. In this post I will be talking about a few things: ...

Background This is a short update of my current hobby project, you can read the previous parts here: MaiSocial - Part 1 (Backend & Frontend initialization) MaiSocial - Part 2 (Comment section, Google SSO) Recently I have been busy & I actually got sick for a whole week, so this update was a bit overdue. This update is going to be a short one, discussing two things: Using WebP instead of PNG Translating kana to romaji WebP? According to Google (the developers of the WebP format), WebP is a modern image format that supports lossless and lossy compression for images. Based on their own research, WebP lossless is 26% smaller compared to PNG, and WebP lossy is 25-34% smaller compared to JPEG with similar quality. As of writing, WebP is supported by at least 95.92% of all users. ...

Background This is a continuation of MaiSocial - Part 1, feel free to read that section first. On this part, I wanted to add a few features: Google SSO using Supabase There is no particular reason why I avoided using Firebase, I just wanted to explore Supabase Simple comment section under each song I will not be doing replies or nested comments (at least for this part) Nickname By default, I will use their UUID provided by Supabase, because I don’t want to leak their email or name I won’t have any unique nickname checking (for this part at least) Authentication Supabase Configuring Google Auth to work with Supabase is pretty straightforward, personally for me Supabase’s docs has a pretty detailed explanation on how to set it up. ...

Disclaimer I am just someone who recently passed the N4 exam. Please take my opinion with a grain of salt. Resources Brute force memorize hiragana & katakana: https://kana-quiz.tofugu.com/ Finish Tae Kim’s complete guide: https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/complete/ Find any missing grammar / vocabulary / kanji for the level you want: https://jlptsensei.com/ Use these Anki decks to help: Japanese Core 2000 Step: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=japanese%20core%202000%20step I recommend skipping step 3 - 5 because it contains many N1-N2 words, so just do 1, 2, 6, 7, … Dictionary of Japanese Grammar: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1013111837 I recommend these Japanese channels: Yusuke (Japanese monologue/dialogue): https://www.youtube.com/@moshimoshi.yusuke Kaname Naito (In-depth nuance explanation): https://www.youtube.com/@kanamenaito Free mock JLPT exam: https://easyjapanese.net/jlpt-test?hl=en-US FAQ Should I use Duolingo? Sure, as long as you don’t use it as the sole resource for learning Japanese. ...