laurieg

Learning a second language is a fantastic way to feel many aspects of being a child again. Having to deal with frustration. Understanding a situation but not be able to fully take part. Being able to communicate but only with the blunt instrument of the words you know.

Remote: Yes (my current time zone is UTC+9)

Willing to relocate: Yes (currently based in Fukuoka, Japan with full permission to work)

Technologies: Javascript/Typescript, Svelte, SvelteKit, Vue, Nuxt, React, Next.js, ThreeJs, WebGPU, CSS, Tailwind, PostgreSQL, Firebase, Pocketbase, Supabase, Playwright, Google Cloud, AWS, Ruby on Rails

Email: laurie.in.{the country I live in}@gmail.com

Hi, I'm Laurie Griffiths. I'm a senior full stack engineer with over 10 years of experience. I am based in Fukuoka, Japan with permission to work in Japan or the UK. I'm a native English speaker and I speak Japanese.

I have experience with a variety of modern and older web stacks. Recently I have enjoyed using SvelteKit to produce performant, accessible websites with great developer experience. I also am a proponent of automated testing and have implemented CI/CD in multiple legacy codebases to allow large-scale refactors and updates without fear.

Also, I produced the game engine and IDE that runs the successful History Mysteries series of escape room board games: https://historymysteries.club/

I am currently contracting and looking for new opportunities, either full-time or contract.

Study a reasonable amount. Make good flashcards[1] and incorporate memorization into your routine.

Try things out. Literally anything. Sports, music, arts, tech. It is so much easier to try out a wide range of things in college.

Find time to reflect. No one here can give you a blueprint for a good life so take some time to think about all the things you are doing, your studies, the company you keep and if these align with your values.

Actually do things. Lots of people sit around talking about their big ideas. Only a small fraction actually do something. It's much easier to poke holes and criticize what other people have done and much harder to stick your neck out and do something.

[1] https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/

Remote: Yes (my current time zone is UTC+9)

Willing to relocate: Yes (currently based in Fukuoka, Japan with full permission to work. British passport holder)

Technologies: Javascript/Typescript, Svelte, SvelteKit, Vue, Nuxt, React, Next.js, ThreeJs, WebGPU, CSS, Tailwind, PostgreSQL, Firebase, Pocketbase, Supabase, Playwright, Google Cloud, AWS, Ruby on Rails

Email: laurie.in.{the country I live in}@gmail.com

Hi, I'm Laurie Griffiths. I'm a senior full stack engineer with over 10 years of experience. I am based in Fukuoka, Japan with permission to work in Japan or the UK. I'm a native English speaker and I speak Japanese.

I have experience with a variety of modern and older web stacks. Recently I have enjoyed using SvelteKit to produce performant, accessible websites with great developer experience. I also am a proponent of automated testing and have implemented CI/CD in multiple legacy codebases to allow large-scale refactors and updates without fear.

Also, I produced the game engine and IDE that runs the History Mysteries series of escape room board games: https://historymysteries.club/

I am currently contracting and looking for new opportunities, either full-time or contract.

This kind of comment could be written about almost anything and is fundamentally un-interesting. You chose to write "weirdo" instead of "screwball" or "bozo" and probably think the more modern "weirdo" captures your intent the best. I'm sure the original authors had a similar thought.

That sounds like a the ear training I have done but even after a couple of decades I don't have any real ability to tell the difference between intervals. For example, I listen to a musical interval and try singing up the major scale to match it but everything matches a fifth (in my internal melody). More recently I found the Sonofield app an interesting idea for learning the intervals but wasn't able to gain any consistency.

I remember many years ago in my music lessons being shocked that some people can hear multiple notes played simultaneously. I've never found much material on learning this skill.

I wonder if there's a bit of survivorship bias with this one. I've never been able to learn relative pitch after trying quite a lot of different methods, ear training app and playing a couple of musical instruments. If you're in a music school then perhaps your baseline musical ability is already relatively high?

Here's how I was taught verb conjugation.

First, we learnt verbs in the -masu form. Nomimasu, tabemasu and so on.

Then we learnt this song (to the tune of Clementine)

chi ri i tte mi ni bi nde kiite giite

It's a quick mneumonic to help you go from the polite verb to the "te-form" ending. I hummed it in my head while working out the conjugation before it became natural and "obvious".

According to amnesty international [0] you'd be put in solitary confinement and restrained with your hands handcuffed to a belt. From the report "Handcuffs are not removed at any time, even during mealtimes, or when the prisoner needs to sleep or use the toilet."

[0] https://www.amnesty.org/fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/asa220...

Japan is importing record numbers of workers. Most convenience stores and supermarkets in my town (far from Tokyo) are staffed by 'language school students' (an you can work 28 hours a week on a student visa). Agreements [1] between Japan and other countries to bring more workers are making headlines. At the same time, it's getting harder and harder to stay.

Permanent residency applications are being judged incredibly strictly. Citizenship applications need 10 years of continuous residence up from 5. Business manager visas have gone from needing 5m yen of capital to 30m yen.

It seems pretty clear that the goal is to get workers in for some productive years but make the path for staying difficult. I guess that's one way to solve an aging population problem.

To put things in perspective, Japan is an island and has entry and exit controls on the borders, so it is estimated that 0.05% of the population is illegal immigrants (people not leaving when their visa runs out). And the police can and do stop visible minorities to confirm their residence status on the spot. It is compulsory to carry identification documents if you are a foreigner. (There are questions about the legality of this but it is common and widely practiced).

[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/10/27/india-valua...

Relatively small clerical errors causing people to get permanent residency applications denied is becoming a trope. The ones I have heard:

- Client company address changed 4 years ago and the paperwork wasn't filed within 2 weeks.

- A late pension payment 2 years ago.

- Pension and health insurance were paid on time, but the date stamp on the physical payment slips was smudged and so "did not prove" that it was paid on time.

- City hall workers didn't send out health insurance slips in time, applicant (through no fault of their own) couldn't pay by the deadline.

This level of strictness is affecting people's lives, ability to make plans, get mortgages etc.

To add to this, permanent residency application times are now very long. After you complete your application some people are waiting nearly 2 years to get a response. There is a lot of vagueness about what happens if the rules change during your application period.

We had an interview scheduled at the start of February which you cancelled with 30 minutes notice stating you had filled the position. Since then, the position has been posted online and to HackerNews hiring threads.

Perhaps there has been a communication mix up here?

(also, when I tried to sign up to your service it was impossible to actually log in)

We had an interview scheduled at the start of February which you cancelled with 30 minutes notice stating you had filled the position. Since then, the position has been posted online and posted to HackerNews hiring threads.

Perhaps there has been a communication mix up here?

I saw a casual lecture given by Tony Hoare as a teenager. The atmosphere was warm and welcoming, even if I didn't fully understand all of the content. I remember he was very kind and answered my simple questions politely.

I make a new card in a folder called People whenever I meet someone. Then I add information like email address, phone number, connections to other people when relevant.

I find engaging like this helps my memory already on its own, but if I'm ever really stuck with a name I just take a quick look at my phone. The person is usually linked to the event where I first met them or similar.

I use the Tracker plugin [1] to make charts of things like running distances etc.

For maps, I have a folder called Places and each markdown file in there is a place. I add latitude and longitude to the frontmatter and then display them on a map.

[1] https://github.com/pyrochlore/obsidian-tracker

Imposter syndrome is a thinking trap. A couple of things you can do to help:

Try to separate out 'ruminating' from 'thinking'. What's the difference? For our purposes 'thinking' has a fixed outcome and an end point. Trying to solve a coding problem. Working out how to make dinner. Calculating your taxes. When you reach your goal, you're done and you stop. 'Ruminating' has no end point. There is not end or action associated with it. The tricky part is that it often masquerades as thinking, so you feel like you're solving a problem.

For example, you do a job interview and you go over and over what happened in your mind. "Maybe I should have answered this differently". "Maybe I should've prepared some more of these questions". Of course, you can't change what happened in the past. You're just rolling the ideas around in your head and probably making yourself feel worse and worse. Rumination can be focused on the past, the future or even some hypothetical, imaginary situation ("What if I lost my job", "What if my house burnt down"). Again, actual preparation (Saving an emergency fund. Getting insurance) has an action associated, but rumination never ends, it just keeps going around in your head.

The other thing is to keep an accurate record of your performance. This will be different for everyone, and varies a lot depending on the job. The key thing is to make the record as close in time to the action as possible. For example, you feel like your pull requests aren't as good as other people's. Don't wait until the end of the week and then reflect on the quality of your work. Instead, every time your make a pull request, write down an accurate, objective assessment of the quality.

People who suffer from imposter syndrome tend to forget their wins and remember their losses again and again (there's that rumination!). By having an accurate record that you made yourself you can cut through this and show to yourself your true performance.

People who do lots of work and ship lots of projects tend to have a certain level of mess in their workshops. Creation is repeated cycles of trial, play, reflection and tidying.

For anyone thinking about trying out Obsidian, here are some problems I have solved with it:

- Remembering where I met someone, what we talked about and then connecting up with them at a later date. My ability to remember names is easily 10x because of obsidian.

- Seeing who in my family's birthday is coming up soon and their address so I can send them a card.

- Graphing how far I've run for each day/week and any quick training notes.

- Showing me friend's restaurant suggestions on a map when I've got a free evening and I want to try something new.

And all of this stored locally and synced onto many devices.

If you're curious I highly recommend starting simple. Don't worry about plugins, just write a quick daily note every day about the information that is important to you. When you feel like you're outgrowing that, adopt a structure that fits you and solves your problems.

I like the message but I think it's worth tempering people's expectations. I spent years working with a few different voice teachers and the amount of practice and dedication you need is substantial. Even after the best part of a decade I am unable to belt.

I started using obsidian about a year ago and I have found it to be an invaluable tool.

The key is using it to solve problems you actually have, rather than problems you want to have.

I was losing track of people's contact details --> I made an addressbook in obsidian.

I wanted to track my exercise to find out how much I was running each week --> make graphs

And so on. Your obsidian should get a bit messy before you try to impose order on it. Use it to solve a problem badly (Just writing down how far I run in a daily diary note) then improve (Writing a query to turn all of those notes into a graph).

Personally I don't use any AI with my knowledge base. Good searching tools and a little bit of organization are the most useful thing for me.

Personally, I think keeping lots of notes/links is a kind of digital hoarding. Just like real hoarding, it's an emotional problem not an organizational problem. If you can work out what emotional need hoarding links is fulfilling for you then you're on the way to working out how to get that emotional need fulfilled by something else.

For someone who hasn't grown up speaking an language with tones or pitches, the process of learning them can be maddening. I applaud anyone who makes tools like this to try to make the process easier.

My experience in learning Japanese pitch accent was eye-opening. At the start, I couldn't hear any difference. On quizzes I essentially scored the same as random guessing.

The first thing that helped me a lot was noticing how there were things in my native language (English) that used pitch information. For example, "uh-oh" has a high-low pitch. If you say it wrong it sounds very strange. "Uh-huh" to show understanding goes low-high. Again, if you reverse it it sounds unusual.

The next part was just doing lots of practice with minimal pairs. Each time I would listen and try my best to work out where the pitch changed. This took quite a lot of time. I feel like massed practice (many hours in a day) helped me more than trying to do 10 minutes regularly. Try to hear them correctly, but don't try too hard. I didn't have any luck with trying harder to 'understand' what was going on. I liken it to trying to learn to see a new color. There isn't much conscious thought.

The final piece of the puzzle was learning phrases, not individual words, that had pitch changes. For example: "yudetamago" could be boiled egg or boiled grandchildren. Somehow my brain just had a much easier time latching on to multi-word phrases instead of single words. Listening to kaki (persimmon) vs kaki (oyster) again and again seemed much harder.

Of course, your mileage may vary with these techniques. I already spoke decent Japanese when I started doing this.

The positive version of this is clocks in escape rooms. You set the countdown timer to be slightly faster for the first 45 minutes and slightly slower for the last 10, so that people get more of a taste of time pressure towards the end and a higher chance of a "photo finish" which makes for a great fun story.

Have you done any work on trying to make the opposite? Injecting English words into Japanese text to make it easier to read?

I find that students of Japanese often have enough grammar to read widely after finishing a couple of beginner textbooks, but they are completely held back by vocabulary.

Cycling in Japan is really interesting. The rules say cycle on the road, following traffic rules, helmets are compulsory.

The average cyclist doesn't wear a helmet, cycles on the pavement and will probably cycle on the incorrect side of the road fairly frequently. Cyclists also routinely ignore stop signs, traffic lights and crossings. I'm over a decade in the road I have only ever seen a cyclist use a hand signal once

Part of the problem is cyclists get almost no infrastructure, while cars get multiple lanes.

> 11. the anxiety goes away

It is genuinely shocking how true this is. Also, it's not a gradual thing. I used to be very nervous about public speaking. I did it a lot and one day it just stops. Very sudden, very unexpected.

The "making a sandwich" demo is definitely a classic.

Here's another I like:

Give groups of kids 10 identical looking items and a balance to compare the weights. Pre-teach how a balance works to compare the weight of items. Ask them to put the items in order from lightest to heaviest. You're basically asking them to come up with a sorting algorithm. Usually, after much experimentation, someone will come up with an algorithm that works. You can work together to try to write down the steps of the algorithm. You can also explore more mathematical ideas like transitivity when comparing different sorted sets of items.

No single tool, script, device or system will stop this.

In fact, blocking tools can actually make this worse. Using a blocking tool is tacitly saying "I can't control myself. I need to hand control to something outside of myself" This basically reinforces the belief that you cannot control your problematic consumption.

You need strategies that reinforce the opposite belief: You are in control of your usage.

I recommend looking into books like Feeling Good and Feeling Great. Get a greater understanding of your emotional state and work out how that feeds into your social media usage.

There are some tools that are useful. The first is time tracking tools. They let you look back on your day and work out how you spent your time. What are the patterns of your usage. Do you always end up struggling after lunch? Or in the evening? What are your triggers?

While I wouldn't recommend blocking sites completely, blocking the most distracting parts of sites can be useful. If you're studying from youtube videos, using a plugin that blocks comments and suggested videos is extremely useful. This means you will no longer catch a glimpse of a thumbnail of something interesting and go off task.

Overall, you have to tackle your emotions and your beliefs about yourself.

I appreciate the clarification, but does it provide any actionable insight on how to learn to discriminate those sounds as an adult?

I think you're right on this one. Children have an immense amount of practice time, support and social pressure to learn a language.

The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones. I know many good speakers of English who cannot distinguish L/R sounds. I basically cannot hear pitch accent differences in Japanese despite having spoken it for over a decade.

This is how things work in Japan. If you are not a Japanese citizen then the police can ask to see your residence card to confirm your status.