2026 April Retro

Projects

After much consternation about presentation programs and making edits to my script in two places after copying it into the slide notes I finally got to give my talk, 10s to 100ms; Optimizing a Legacy Endpoint. The reception was definitely positive; I got 3 good questions afterwards when it's pretty rare to get one and a few people came up to say they enjoyed it. Someone even added me on Linkedin to tell me they liked it!

It was not problem free; I took a drink partway through and immediately regretted it, panicked and dropped the cap of my bottle. Also when I first got the projector working with my laptop the wallpaper was not only not the same as my main display but one of the ~5 out of thousands of wallpapers which were not exactly appropriate to display to a room full of people, which got some chuckles before I yanked the cord.

But overall I'm really happy I did it; was a cool experience and I haven't talked in front of a group of people at all since leaving uni. Hope I get the chance to do it again someday.

Games

Bug Fables had some fun Paper Mario-esque ideas and the art direction grew on me, but they ran out of new mechanics a few hours in and the story wasn't enough to make me sign up for the classic JRPG grind.

Nothing Beyond this Point (by an Aussie dev!) was a shockingly good top-down bullet hell Metroidvania which I couldn't put down despite it being set in a literal void; high praise for someone who often chooses which MVs to play based on how pretty they look.

Later Alligator was an amusing point & click adventure with a very distinctive style, absolutely jam-packed with surprising pop culture references.

Planet of Lana asks "what if Inside discovered colors and hope?" then answers with aplomb.

Books

Not much time for reading between talk prep and gaming but I still read and enjoyed The Saint of Bright Doors, the strange tale of a chosen one who determinedly refuses to be.

General Life Stuff

Overall a pretty chill month after our non-stop honeymoon in Italy but still some notable events, chief among which was The Wife passing her practical driving test! Maintaining her pattern of "one fail one pass" from the learner's test (in addition to her "I narrowly failed once so all hope is lost") as well! A great achievement for someone who last year was nearly paralyzed by fear trying to drive in a straight line down an empty country road.

We also went on a weekend outing for the first time in a while (between driving school and recovering from Italy); visiting our old favourite Jinbocho for some spicy ramen before strolling around the Imperial Palace with a brief stop to revisit Showa-kan.

With STS2 Early Access released and adding multiplayer I introduced it to our Russian friends; not suspecting they'd get almost as into it as me. I bought them a copy so we could play together in person, then the husband bought his wife a copy so they could play together and as I'm writing this they've played 33 hours together or with me in the last two weeks. Finally I've managed to corrupt some productive citizens into gaming degenerates haha. The Wife remains staunchly incorruptible sadly, and was on her phone well before we finished the run we were meant to play together in person. The Wife is a lady of endless wonderful qualities but liking games is simply not among them.

Another Russian friend also mentioned I look like Charles the 3rd during a visit, notable for the fact he is currently a 77 year old man.

Also also, The Wife learned how to tie her shoes! Properly at least, she has not been walking around with untied laces her whole life. Given the speed with which she learned it and remembered every time since then I suspect she did know at some point then forgot, but still pretty funny that she didn't know for a while.

Work

Nothing particularly stands out; a lot of back & forth on what should've been a simple feature which I still somehow don't have clear requirements for and some more work helping out on the custom onboarding flow for Vault.

We did have the annual summit; this one was more interesting that last year but predictably AI-focused. The post-summit barbeque was immeasurably better than standing around in a cramped 'restaurant' though.

What Went Badly

Despite eventually passing, The Wife did fail her first attempt at the practical driving test. This revealed some less than ideal parts of the Japanese Driving School system, as when pressed the driving school staff admitted that if she didn't pass in the next 2-3 attempts (before 9 months elapsed from her starting at the school) she'd have to start all over again. If this seems like a gigantic scam which would result in a lot of lawsuits they probably agree, because after informing us we couldn't pay for additional lessons to get more practise (?!?) the lady said "you don't need to worry about not passing" with a significant look. Which makes you wonder how many hopeless drivers are on Japanese roads... Then again seeing the kind of stuff you need to do/know to pass the exams here I'm not sure anyone who does things properly is much better off, just a flood of useless information. Why on Earth would you need to know how much you can safely carry on the back of a motorcycle in order to drive a car? Surely learning all this useless crap just makes you more likely to forget useful information? Are they training people to be traffic cops?

Action Items

Review

Nail my first ever programming talk

Nailed it, see above.

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