An oldie but a goodie. The site has been around since 2011. What’s great about this site is the general idea that you don’t necessarily need a framework (ie React) for everything.
“Never rewrite” is a popular cargo-cult that sprang from a well known blog article that made the rounds some years ago. The urge to rewrite can be a naive impulse for sure, but there are LOTS of cases where new and better technology can result in tremendous gains, or where a code base is simply too far gone to redeem. The biggest successes of my career have almost all been ground up rewrites of existing products using new technology or techniques that resulted in orders-of-magnitude improvements in performance and ROI. If you can make incremental improvements that’s great, but sometimes it’s just not possible to rewrite “a piece at a time” because there are no pieces, just one big ball of mud. To the original author: If you don’t rewrite this mess, your competitors will. I’d say: lay out the case for an overhaul, stand your ground, don’t implement any new features until you’ve got a clear path to reducing technical debt, and if you can’t get buy-in to an overhaul just leave. What you’re describing sounds like a textbook scenario for burnout and there are lots of other opportunities where you can work on things in ways that you’ll actually enjoy.
SevenEleven ATMs generally take foreign interac debit cards if you need cash (yen). Most places accept credit cards. When given the option on the debit card machine to pay in yen or convert to USD / CAD etc always choose yen, to avoid high conversion rates charged by the processor. Allow your credit card company to convert to your home currency at a much better rate. Get a Japan Rail pass. Pack lightly and hit a Uniqlo on arrival. Call hotels to book rather than using western-based online booking platforms whose prices are a lot higher, or use Jalan.net. Remember you’re a guest in a foreign country, stay humble and be polite, it’ll get you further. Seriously, get a Japan rail pass. Get an esim for your phone upon arrival using an app like Ubigi or similar (1 month with 10gb for ~$20). Be prepared for reverse culture shock when you return home.
- Most bank ATMs in Japan now accept foreign cards.
- Credit card acceptance remains low by international standards, although things have improved a bit with the "cashless" drive. Carry cash (yen), you'll need it at many restaurants and even some hotels.
- Most rail companies now sell discounted advance fares and LCC airlines are competitive as well, so a Japan Rail Pass is no longer the no-brainer it used to be, although it's still a good deal if you plan to travel a lot by train (say, Tokyo-Hiroshima and back).
- Instead of calling hotels, which will be a struggle because they often won't speak much English, use Japanese booking sites like Rakuten or Jalan.net, which have thorough coverage, the best rates and functional English interfaces.
Have a read through https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Japan, it goes into too much detail at times but is a pretty good primer for all the things in Japan.
Sorry, but it’s not out of date. Based on very recent extensive travel and living there. But yes of course there are additional places to get cash (yubinkyoku etc) and various rail passes. The JR pass really is a nobrainer though.
I really recommend doing the math based on your particular itinerary. I've been to Japan twice, 14 days each time, and, at best, I would have broken even on a JR rail pass based on the traveling did. For longer trips, like Tokyo <-> Sapporo airplanes are both quicker and cheaper.
It's more for flexiblilty and peace of mind, with a all-you-can-ride ticket, you can book all itinerary/reserved-seat tickets(when available) right when you land, and have the flexibility to bail on any single train connection when you couldn't make it, either because of emergencies, or you just like the place you're visiting so much that you'd like to move your tour schedule around a bit.
And it's not like you have to get the pass for all region, there are dozens of types of regional jr passes depending on the region you're visiting. Those are the ones that's of better value when travelling in-region, and covers most touristy places.
Personally I'd say tokyo-wide, kaisai, and hokkaido are the ones that's pretty no-brainer when in those regions.
Mizuho, SMBC, Aeon, MUFJ ATMs all accept foreign cards these days. Inaka Ginko still probably won't though.
I've been to Japan tens of times for work, family and holiday reasons, and I've never found a use case where the JR pass would have paid off for me. Then again, I tend to fly in and stick with a single region; if you're doing the tourist trail thing where you're going (eg.) Tokyo-Kyoto-Himeji-Hiroshima-Tokyo in a straight line in one week, than sure, it makes sense.
This is all great and relevant advice! I have actually considering moving there, any tips with respect to that? For example could I, as a US citizen, work remotely for a US company while living in Japan indefinitely (not necessarily permanently, but at least as an option)?
Visas will be your challenge. Unless you’re married to a Japanese person, it will be hard for you to get a work visa without being employed by a Japanese company. Any way to try to get around that is gonna be a lot of work (and a bit of money too).
However, if you wanted to take a 1 year sabbatical, you could get a job as an engineer with a Japanese company, work for a year, apply for fast track permanent residency at the end of that year (you’ll need to meet some education/income requirements), then go back to your old job remotely. There are software jobs that hire people who don’t speak Japanese.
Basically no. But if your company has a Japanese branch and is willing to transfer you there, then maybe. But be aware that visiting Japan as a tourist vs living and working there are very different experiences, and plenty of expats burn out within a year. Visit first, maybe do the digital nomad thing for a bit.
>For example could I, as a US citizen, work remotely for a US company while living in Japan indefinitely (not necessarily permanently, but at least as an option)?
NO.
You must have a work visa to live here, and you won't get that unless a Japanese company sponsors your visa. A US company can't do that for obvious reasons, unless it's a company with a Japanese branch office.
The only way to do what you ask is to get permanent residence first, but that means living here for a while on a work visa or spouse visa.
Also, on top of this, the US company may have issues with you living outside the US while working for them, but that'll be the case for any other country. This was discussed within the last week or so here on HN.
I figured that might be the case, thank you for the information. I think I would struggle to adjust to the Japanese work culture in order to establish residence within these constraints.
I also pretty much exclusively have software experience in government contracting so the jump to commercial would be pretty big too.
Just out of curiosity, why are you considering moving to Japan?
I am not trying to discourage you, but if you really want to live in Japan, you have to learn Japanese, which is not an easy language to learn, especially for English speakers, even if you live in Tokyo.
I am going next month, the Japan Rail pass sounds like a big saving, can I also use Shinkansen trains with the Rail Pass? Specifically the Tokyo to Kyoto route (JR central)?
Look carefully at it; probably you won't be able to use the fastest trains with the JR pass.
Also, if you're just going to Kyoto from Tokyo, it really is not worth it to get the pass. Just buy regular tickets. The pass is useful if you're doing a lot of train travel in a short time.
That's fine, but if you spend more money to go slower, that's just stupid. The point is that the pass is a really bad deal, or at best, break-even, unless you're traveling a long distance and within a short-ish timespan. Tokyo-Kyoto is not a long distance and isn't worth the pass at all.
Of course. Foreign keys are elementary. Try recursive CTEs. You can get ridiculous performance gains by not having to marshal data into the application space. It’s all about using the right tool for the job. If you’ve done solid system-level design then running migrations probably shouldn’t be the primary driver of your schema.
This may not be a popular comment, but if you have to ask, then no. In Canada at least, engineering is a regulated profession. No one can legally call themselves an engineer without a four-year Bachelor of Engineering degree from an accredited University and membership in the professional engineering body of the Province in which they practice. Doctors and lawyers are other regulated professions; one cannot simply call themselves a doctor, lawyer or engineer.
My first ever mobile app was an experimental bit of Android Malware. It got demo'd by my colleague at Blackhat [1]. I'm definitely not a hacker, but with a few basic tricks I was able to create a pretty effective trojan which we then injected into a popular game (again only for experimental purposes, it was never released in the wild). In our lab we had literally millions of samples of Android malware, but for iOS we had only two (which only worked on jailbroken phones). Fun times.
Apple's iOS is way more secure than Android in several aspects. The best example is their 5 years of guaranteed security (and features!) updates, versus 2-3 tops in Android (even <1 with Chinese cheap brands than are very common in Europe, such as Xiaomi).
Excellent post, if only for the fact that its a great way to share "what works for me" at a time when most of our local JS/Web meetup groups have been put on hold due to the pandemic, or gone onto Twitch / Zoom, so its harder to have those casual "I'm really loving such-and-such" conversations now. Thanks for sharing. FWIW I also like the general keep-it-simple / YAGNI approach. I switched from TypeScript to straight up JSDoc and with the right IDE setup it works beautifully.
Nobody seems to be talking much about favipiravir, which seems a bit like not-invented-here syndrome. If it stood to make a lot of money for some US big pharma company I suspect we'd be hearing more about it.
It seems to me like people "talking much about" unproven drugs is the problem, and that favipiravir (and its patients) is lucky to have been spared much of that nonsense.
People want to talk about this stuff because it feels like a magic bullet. Viral infections don't have magic bullets[1], they just don't. We have to beat this with elbow great: huge amounts of testing and tracing once the outbreak is at a manageable baseline, and high uptake of mitigation strategies like social distancing until it gets there. And yes, that costs a lot of money.
[1] Rather: they do, but they're called vaccines and take time.
They do. Consider HIV/AIDS. Nowadays, someone who gets HIV-positive at the age of 20 can expect to live to 70. It's quite astounding what modern combination therapy can do.
And the current treatments for hepatitis C have mild side effects and usually eradicate the infection even if the infection has been going on for 20 years.
Not if the effect size is large. That would be proved in no time. The problem is so far all effect sizes are small, so it will take trials with large power (and longer term) to discern any positive benefit.
