I’ve recently wondered how my childhood would have changed had the school year started in April instead of September. To be honest, I’ve always found it quite depressing to start with a new class, a new teacher, make new friends as the winter was visibly approaching. Maybe that’s just me looking at Japan with my rose-tinted glasses again though.

Spring means a lot of new things for everyone at the same time and, you know, cherry blossoms, picnics, drinks at the river. It’s exciting, it’s fun. It’s really a fun time.

A fun time except I hurt my back at the gym, which is the official version I tell everyone. But in reality, I think it happened during my sleep. But ssshhh. That injury sort of snowballed into many different smaller injuries… the rib cage muscles, the shoulder, and whatnot. My body is trying to communicate something. The funny thing is that whenever I search for my symptoms online, there’s pretty much always some doctor advocating that yoga is a good approach to recovery. So now I got to do yoga I think. I tried many years ago and it really sucked but if that’s the price to pay so my body can function a few more decades with less pain, I think I’m open to it now.

In other news, I’ve been tearing this site apart. I wrote some case studies, I migrated my old portfolio in a sort of archive. I redesigned a bit, cleaned stuff up. I simplified my themes because I think at some point I had 7 and it was just ridiculous and messy. So now sorry, there’s just the two (light and dark mode); we’ll let it at that until I catch the bug again.

I’ve been toying with the idea of publishing notes related to work, design and AI on my website but I still don’t know what the right approach is. All my notes are super messy right now. It’s a big collection of bullet points with no shape or form. I need to read, categorize them, discern the good stuff from the bad stuff. Ugh. I think I’ll do it, but I need time. I need another season worth of time.

I’m writing this on January 1st. I’ve had delicious soba for lunch, as is tradition. I’m having kuro mame daifuku (black soybeans mochi rice cake) right now with my coffee, yummy. Cold has settled in Kyoto. Maybe I said this already but I love winter here. It’s often quite sunny. We have less tourists. Sometimes we have snow and we play all day outside with the kids.

AI has become the norm for most things at work. I certainly enjoy not having to perform tedious coding tasks but also, I constantly wonder if we’ll realize when we do not have “control” over our codebase anymore. Sort of like the boiling frog metaphor, you know?

2026 feels like a good time to ask myself and others a few questions:

• What kind of software do I still want to build in 2026 and beyond?

• What’s my profession now?

• I enjoy using the power of 10,000 suns in my terminal but can I use any of it to build more connections with people?

• How will all this stuff affect my children? At school but beyond as well. I didn’t plan any of this in 2017. I thought we were like 50 years off. Or to be more honest, I didn’t think about any of this at all.

• And by the way, will we ever go back not thinking about any of this at all? As in, when does this become so ubiquitous that it ceases to be a topic of conversation between adults?

I write this from Fake Autumn 2025. Temperatures are down but let’s not rejoice too quick. Summer will kick our arses one last time at least between now and mid-October, as is tradition now.

Enough with the weather update. Life has been good. We spent the month of August in Marseille. I can’t tell if my kids enjoyed it or not.

My son decided that he will attend our local Japanese elementary school after 2 years at the French International School. His Japanese is quite rusty and he has a lot to catch up… But, it’s been 3 weeks already and he’s having fun. He leaves for school and comes back on his own (or with the neighbours). It’s been quite interesting for him to point out all the little cultural differences.

The students are the ones responsible for serving the meals at lunch. They also make teams to clean different parts of the school every day. His class went and visited the behind-the-scenes of our local supermarket.

I’m not too sure exactly whether and how I should document his “exchange program” year. More on that later maybe.

I stepped outside this morning and it’s already 25 degrees. Dude, it’s not even June yet. What is this.

Tsuyu(梅雨) is coming and we decided to be brave and run away, leave Japan for a month this summer. We’re going back home, see the family, enjoy the mediterranean summer for a few weeks.

In April, we spent a weekend in Shiga. In May, another in Kobe and now we’re thinking to go to Maizuru early June, check out the sea with the kids. They love doing getaway weekends so much. I need to find a moment to take us to Tokyo later.

Celebrating my first anniversary of actually going to the gym and exercising. It’s helped me a lot with hormonal levels and my mood. Also I’ve lost some weight which is nice.

It’s really time to publish this website. I just won’t do it. That is serious evidence I am not able to ship anything without threats and violence… No, let’s do it this time.

We celebrated my son’s 8th birthday, that was a ton of fun. We finished Astro Bot over the break and now we sometimes go back to it to chase after the last unlockables. It’s really that good. Next up on the list will be Monster Hunter Wilds with online friends.

I still work as a product designer at a Japanese company. AI has creeped up enough to become a weekly conversation internally. I write this as DeepSeek just came out and Nvidia stocks plummeted for reasons.

I’ve had this personal website on my computer for about a month (really not sure), I’m quite satisfied with it. Lies again. I’m embarassed by it but I’m embarassed by everything so I haven’t really published it yet. Maybe later. I’d love to maintain an “open garage” philosophy with it, keep tweaking it over time, that sort of thing. I’ve seen & heard people talk about digital gardens. I’ve always liked the idea but it’s not really that yet, I think that’s ok?

Discussing summer vacation plans with the family. Am I really going to Hiroshima in August? It can’t be possibly worse than Kyoto?