Ian Lewis' Blog

Recently I've been writing a lot of blog posts about programming topics and I haven't really talked about much of the many things that have happened recently. Two big things and many many small things have happened recently. I'll start with the big things and perhaps blog about some of the smaller things at a later time.

Big thing #1: I got a new job.

I had been looking for a new job for a while but without luck but a good opportunity come to me in September so I've moved from my job programming mostly SOAP web service backend server applications at Think to a new job programming Web applications in Python using Django at BeProud. This might be Greek to a lot of you but the end result is that work is a lot more fun now. I am also getting paid about twice as much as before to do it.

Another big difference is that there are no English speaking folks at the new job. This might seem seem like it would be a con rather than a pro but it means that I no longer have to support other folks because they don't speak Japanese. This makes work a whole lot easier. About 25% of my previous job was to support other programmers who don't speak Japanese and aren't familar with Japanese business practices and customs. This meant training and teaching. It also meant that for every meeting I attended in Japanese I would either had to have another meeting in English to inform the non-Japanese speaking folks what was decided and why, or no one would know what was going on. Not having to worry about that makes a big difference.

Big thing #2: I moved to a new apartment.

With my new job being in a different place and since my old apartment was in my old company's name I moved at the beginning of this month. The new apartment is over twice as big ( and twice as expensive) but it was worth it. The old apartment was tiny. And I mean tiny. In Japanese the apartment not including the kitchen and bathroom was 6 Jyou.  Which is roughly 10m².Which is roughly 107 square feet. The total apartment was probably about 125 square feet or so. So I'm not joking when I say it's tiny. And I lived there for 2 years. Even the new apartment is only about 450 square feet but by Tokyo standards it's large for a single person. In any case the new place is much easier to live in.

Here are some pictures.