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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

Resigning from my job

I joined Cosmart on October 2024. When I joined, it had a hybrid working arrangement, 2 days in the office, 3 days from anywhere. The job was fun, my team was very kind & understanding to me. If things stayed like this forever, I don’t see myself leaving for another job unless it is moving to a foreign country (I want to get a software engineering job in Japan, but I am also open to other countries, depending on the situation)

Fast forward to January, and the working arrangement changed to a full work from office schedule. 5 days workweek, commute to and from office. A few weeks after that, the remaining frontend member of the tech team resigned, making the remaining backend engineers transition to a fullstack role for a while until a fullstack engineer was hired. But then the remaining product manager resigned, so the product manager role was shared between a team lead and someone else whose original role is not a product manager.

I learned a lot during the past 10 months, from frontend development to CI/CD and cloud infrastructure stuff. The experience I had with the tech team at Cosmart is something that I will cherish for the rest of my life.

A new personal project on the works

I have created a repository for my upcoming personal project, Goi (語彙). The backstory for this project is that I took the N3 JLPT exam on the 6th of July, 2025. Vocabulary is something that I struggled with the most, because it is not only used on the first part of the exam, but also the latter parts (reading, listening).

By curating my own personal vocabulary list, I hope to combine learning Japanese with creating a project that I am passionate about. I will share updates regarding this project on my blog.

Preparing for next month’s marathon

Due to a coworker telling me about an upcoming marathon, I decided to joined the 2025 Garmin Run in the 14th of September, 2025. This would be my first official race, and I joined the 5K run.

My personal target is to run 5K under 30 minutes, but my training is very inconsistent (due to the full work from office arrangement, I can only run in the mornings or late at night). Hopefully I could use the remaining time to get myself back in track.