Day job#

Compared to the branching years of 2022 and 2023, this year felt calmer. It was peaceful partly because there was no accompanying regret, but how you interpret a lull depends on the person.

For the most part, I spent the year reallocating my maxed-out AGI to VIT and DEX, so to speak. I became a bit wiser about IaC and its automation, observability, and Google Cloud. We also did a lot to reduce infrastructure costs, and as a team we managed to improve the cost-to-revenue ratio by a fair amount. Hate waste.

I wrote two articles, albeit few:

• Tips for installing Datadog Agent on a GKE Autopilot environment
• In tfaction v1.3.0, updates to local modules can now trigger tfaction

My writing speed has been slowing year by year, so I’d be happy if I can keep writing this year as rehab.

One point to reflect on is schedule management. As a platform team, we constantly negotiate with each stream-aligned team, and I needed to learn how to draw lines that factor that in. Product management in platform engineering is particularly difficult; I have to cultivate a feel for it. Sometimes the friction makes me feel like I’m going to die. As a personal improvement, I want to insert reviews in smaller chunks more intentionally.

Out of concern for the team’s best performance, I sometimes neglected my own too much. But I don’t really want to succeed by pushing others aside, so it’s hard. I want people to be happy. And yet I keep gladly stepping back… which probably isn’t good.

FLOSS#

It was probably my least active year since I started doing FLOSS-y things. I wanted to dedicate more of my disposable time to personal matters, so I scaled down Rust and other activities and left some teams. I thought I’d keep being a nitpicky alumnus. (Kidding.)

It’s quite hard to be financially independent on FLOSS alone. You need branding in addition to engineering. For better or worse, in reality it often depends less on what you did and more on how loudly you trumpeted it, and if you can’t go along with that, benefactors won’t find you. PR is indeed a way to help FLOSS, but my old-internet anti-commercial ethos kept me from putting effort there.

That said, as experience it’s absolutely valuable, and for someone like me with “no academic credentials, no career,” it works powerfully as a compensator. To the young with a future who are struggling: keep doing it, including promotion. Step over this old man’s corpse.

Life events#

I got married. I always thought I’d be a rootless drifter, so even I’m surprised—and still smiling about it. In 2023 I had regrets because I failed to strike while the iron was hot, but this time I was able to put that experience to use, so it didn’t go to waste. You never know how life will turn.

LoL#

If I think about what I spent the most time on in 2024, it’d be LoL.

I’m terrible at diversifying emotional dependencies, so being able to build relationships different from work here was a stroke of luck. I like getting to know different kinds of people, and this functioned well as a place to interact with people I wouldn’t normally meet if I only did engineering.

That said, I wish the environment would stop being so harsh on ADC.

Travel#

I hope I can even set foot overseas in 2024.

Yuki Okushi 2024, ‘The state of @JohnTitor, 2023’, 2k36, weblog post, 1 Jan, accessed 18 Jan 2025, https://www.2k36.org/posts/the-state-of-johntitor-2023.

I managed to achieve it by visiting Hawaii in the summer. The sun was strong, but it was relatively comfortable, and I got to enjoy “typical” experiences like the beach and Mai Tai.

The Conrad Osaka I visited in winter was excellent. It was the only domestic hotel added to my “want to revisit” list in 2024.

As a little anecdote, when I’m at foreign-chain hotels dressed with white hair and colored contacts, people often speak to me in English—which I find a bit funny. When my faltering speech makes them switch to Japanese, I feel like I’ve lost. I don’t want to lose this year.

I also went to a Christmas market for the first time in a couple of years. The mulled wine I had after a long while tasted like another world.

Going forward#

In “The Lesson of Evil,” there’s a scene where Hasumi (the protagonist), who crossed the sea in high spirits, is crushed by a greater force and realizes this isn’t a stage where he can dance. In the end, he chooses a Japanese high school as the place where he can dance like a megalodon, not a great white shark fearing the strong. Such enlightenment makes things easier, but there’s also the fear that if you stop swimming you’ll die. What is truly appropriate for me?

Someone once told me: “You’re like a razor blade—sharp, but you snap easily at small things. In the end, it’s the hatchet—dull but unmoving even against big trees—that survives in this world.” I see; perhaps that sense is important for living. It’s easier, too. But if such thick skin makes me unable to see something, then there’s no point to living. I want to keep admiring the beautiful things I can see now for the rest of my life. I don’t want to stop making a victory pose to no one in particular, facing the wall.

How am I now? Am I shaking off the afterglow and dancing properly? Have the things I should endure already become invisible?