Hi there 👋

We regret to inform you that… One of my new year resolution was to apply to a Japanese company. I did managed to get to the interview stage on PayPay Card thanks to my friend’s referral. Come October, my morale was immediately crushed by a rejection letter after the system design stage. This stings because of a few things: I spent a lot of time studying & doing mock interviews with my friend I thought I did well during the system design stage, outside of a few hiccups: Forgetting the fact that upon receiving requests from the same idempotency key, we should return the exact same response instead of returning a 4xx response Not knowing what is optimistic locking (having an explicit version column, UPDATE using WHERE version = ?, check number of updated rows) because I only used pessimistic locking Explicitly mentioning usage of foreign keys on my schema design, while on systems of scale you’re kind of expected to partition your DB (this breaks constraints, including foreign keys) Personally I felt that the shortcomings are not that bad, considering I’m applying for a mid level role. But the fact that I’m rejected is something I have to accept, even if it stings. I might be coping, but rejection can also be due to external factors: ...

Opening thoughts I’m overall very satisfied with my life this month, even through it’s ups and downs. Thanks to my goals being achieved, there is a lot of cognitive load that disappeared from my mind. I can just focus on a few things at a time. N2 JLPT Result It kind of slipped my mind but the JLPT July 2026 results are finally published online. Somehow I passed despite guessing 7 reading questions. What surprised me even more is the fact that my reading is a higher score than language knowledge (vocabulary + grammar). I thought my grammar was good though (and to be fair, reference information did show my grammar as A, which means I got two thirds of the grammar questions correct), so I suspect that my vocabulary is the limiting factor. ...

Some thoughts I’ve stumbled across this video and I think it is something worth thinking about. How many things can you balance in your life before suffering from burnout or having to let go some parts of your passion? Career/job is something that obviously is a part of most people’s lives. No job, no income, no food. Family is also something non negotiable unless you really want to cut off your family ties once and for all. I feel like cutting off family connections is a one and done thing, where I don’t think it is possible to mend. I’m single, so I can’t fathom the stress of other people having their own families on top of their existing families (sandwich generation). Outside of those two is probably personal hobbies. Unfortunately if you ask me my hobbies, they require consistency: ...

Ok there was a lot of things happening, but I haven’t updated my blog because I don’t really see a benefit to it. Body weight & blood pressure progress So around May - early June I hit a huge… something? I don’t know what to call it but my mental wasn’t something I would call “good”. My health regressed very badly, with my body weight reaching 71.5kg at one point. My blood pressure was constantly above 130/85 too. ...

On my last update I wrote this: Work has been very stressful I can’t lie… Hopefully once the dust settles my health improves. Honestly, the work is still very stressful, which is why the weekends and any holidays much more sweet. But it also causes me sadness during the edge of holidays / weekends, such as right now where my thoughts are mostly “oh no tomorrow I have work again”. ...

I didn’t wrote a January 2026 update. As a result, I completely forgot what happened 😄 So while it is still February, I’m going to push an update! Chunithm: reached 16.5 rating So I ended up finishing my new year’s resolution by February 😄 My current rating is 16.63, so I guess I can go for 16.75? It’s an uphill battle, so I’m hesitant to set 17 as my target rating this year. ...

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 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: ...

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. ...