https://alexwilson.tech
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Reader, this week I am looking at the world through new eyes. Primed by some smaller conversations last weekend, a discussion about classifying cultures connected big dots in my head, and further reading/thinking/talking led me to an epiphany: I understood my identity for the first time: You see, dear reader, being half, I am both of my nationalities, and yet paradoxically I am also neither. They form an interwoven tapestry where language for one describes the behaviours and thinking of the…
Reader, where did I leave you? Ah. On the train to watch the World Cup. Monday was a holiday, so we pulled an all-nighter and enjoyed watching Spain win, followed by a quest to find a full English breakfast. 大成功だった！ During the day I managed to crank out the chores including finishing a clothes shop. Summer is well and truly here, and for the next six weeks (at least) I am going to need to sequester a supply of spare shirts in my office desk. A decent chunk of my time at work this week went into…
On Tuesday the cicadas reawoke, officially marking the start of summer. Both heat and humidity dials are set to “high”: And it’s easier to deal with if you stay outdoors. Between the cracks this weekend I revamped my /about page, and have experimentally added a /now page. My recent MCR and DNB phases came together in the discovery of a producer and in particular their live-set at the Camden Assembly in 2025. If you only have 2.5 minutes: 1:15:15~1:17:45. Truuuust me. Wrote my objectives for the…
This was a good week for eating Okinawan food and for achieving several huge paperwork wins. I’ve unlocked a whole new world of being fiscally responsible. Received a few nice voice notes via my sister who bumped into my high-school maths teacher. “Maths is a game and we invent the rules”. Words to live by! Marked this year’s tanabata in a symmetrical way, but this time instead of searching for a tree, I shared fish & chips and haggis in Osaki and reflected on everything that happened since…
This week I’ve been thinking about career paths, about how to quantify and measure things and social capital. Oh and the humidity has been rising fast. Re-established my gym routine, this time equipped with a new (and cheaper) app for planning and tracking. Did that thing this week where when people brought problems, instead of just listening, I went full career coach mode. This isn’t a muscle I’ve worked out much lately and I forgot how much I enjoy it. More of this? Bittersweet leaving…
Big week. Got mostly good news. Made some principled decisions. Graduated to a retainer. For my first non-technical post on this blog, I published a short speech in Japanese called “The Same Hobby”. There’s a story behind the speech, and another behind the column layout (check it out on desktop, and with a screen-reader!), long story short is that I want to do more like this. Leaving drinks at the pop-up terrace were very nice. Even the part where an unexpected visitor dropped onto us from a…
As part of a recent language programme, I was asked to give a short speech in Japanese. I'm finding it quite challenging to learn, so this was a golden opportunity to talk about something else it is teaching me. Setup: 皆さん、最近、面白いことがわかりました。 私の三つの趣味は、同じ趣味です。Folks uh, recently I realised something interesting: My three hobbies are the same hobby. Triple: その三つは、エレクトロニックな音楽と、走ることと、日本語の勉強です。The three are: electronic music, running, and studying Japanese. Beat 1:…
Most of my time this week went into goal-setting and on learning Japanese. On goal-setting: This was both attending training, and writing/reviewing goals for my department. Nearly there. On learning Japanese: I have been trying new tools and routine to see what works well, did orientation for my new classes, and have formally verified out that I am now somewhere between N5 and N4! And unexpectedly I played the role of translator on Friday. It felt like every day this week I got a different bit…
To set the scene: Last weekend I lost my voice, and then on Monday I woke up feeling totally ill. Maybe it was change of seasons, maybe it was the typhoon, or, maybe it was just not taking a break since in months. Probably a mixture of all three. Some things I have learned about losing your voice: It wasn’t as big a deal as I felt: Nobody minded postponing, cancelling or facilitating my meetings. In big meetings that couldn’t be skipped, people were more attentive to chat than normal. So I…
Lots of small things on the docket this week, which made me think back to Rocks, Pebbles & Sand. I broke down all of my ongoing work and priorities in this way and shared it with my team. Hopefully this will earn me spinach. One of the pebbles was starting a trial for an internal tool which had been blocked by various approvals for over a month. After waiting over a month, it was very satisfying to see my work, “just work”. This week we had a typhoon, which wasn’t super severe, but it was my…
Another week, another special assignment. This one particularly interesting as it involves applying AI in a novel way. We do a lot of prep over the week. At the same time, I have started writing objectives for the next two quarters which is surprisingly hard. Yakiniku on Monday night is very good. This won’t be my last time at GEMs this week. Hey, good news, I no longer have braces! Bad news: I now have a retainer. My dentist is positively chuffed that we got here, almost exactly six months…
Monday I took the day off to do some personal shopping as a follow-up to the image consulting. The hardest part was buying new shoes, because virtually nowhere stocks my size. But it was great and I got a few new ideas. Yeah so anyway the shoes have already chewed through one of my heels. Let’s try this again in a few weeks. We’re in evaluation season, and as well as doing my own, for the first time in a long time it’s my turn to hear other people’s evaluations and later to calibrate them. This…
Lots of architecture and design work this week. In the run-up to the end of the quarter there’s also a lot of small things to wrap-up but not enough time. Access & Identity (aka Auth) is a fascinating domain. I was summoned for some belated birthday drinks at The Aldgate which is a delightful pub. There I received some confirmation bias, and an interesting fortune reading. We tried to decode a curious social dynamic, met someone from my hometown and by the end of the night I had been thoroughly…
This week was golden week, coinciding with my birthday. Instead of a string of bank holidays and the string of ambitious (offline) travel plans, I was summoned and spent the week indoors working and ordering in the entire inventory of CHOPPED SALAD DAY. The work thing was a bit stressful, but it played to my strengths and I enjoyed supporting/rallying teams to accomplish a huge target, and as a little treat, I built (and evangelized) the codemod engine that I’ve wanted for most of my career. On…
This week is, well, busy. And the weather is genuinely perfect. At the start of the week I wrote a 30 minute talk, but postponed it at the eleventh hour after being delayed (and, a small case of nerves). Pretty happy with the state I got it into though. Only went and injured myself running again, didn’t I! Wednesday was a public holiday, and I spent it mostly catching up on errands. The remainder of the week was spent speaking to many many teams and arranging boxes on a diagram, and then…
This week a new section was born in my Slack. That’s what kind of week it was. Really enjoying project work. All the frameworks are now in place. Architecture is mostly aligned. Real progress is happening. It has come at the cost of a few late nights: One of which we had Fish & Chips, for me for the first time since moving to Tokyo. It was alright. I enjoyed Wednesday. Capped the week at Manager Camp, where for my self intro I talked about spice, symmetry and love. This was my first away-day…
Between the weather and a project: Things are heating up this week. WithGreen’s taco-rice salad is pretty good. Lots of Japanese-only meetings this week as we seek to resolve some important things. I enjoy it: It is exactly the immersion I sought when coming to Japan. Friday night I went to a club looking for someone whose phone had died, and spent the entire night looking for them. We didn’t meet, but I did encounter a verrrry popular influencer/streamer, who is much, much shorter IRL than…
A combination of shifting emotions and shifting priorities made this week a roller-coaster. Worked a lot on architecture this week. Both processing the results of last week’s workshop, and something new which is in the pipeline and has an exciting deadline. Did I mention I’m a manager now? Restarted running: My progress is slow and painful but I am enjoying it. Obanzai in Ebisu was delightful. Seriously underrated style of cuisine. Taco Wednesday was a fun time. A vibe-coded game came up and we…
A few things I was looking forward to happened this week, and the weather could not be better. Got some brutal feedback from a friend at a yakitori restaurant. The kind of brutal honesty you can only get from friends, over chicken that is so fresh it allegedly expires after 30 seconds. Appreciated, thank-you. Led an all-day architecture workshop in our Nagoya branch office. The purpose was to design and test a single API for a group of complex subsystems, which we did by modelling its entire…
Reader, this week I closed a chapter. It represented a lot of work and many side-quests, and now it is done I feel a bit hollow. Sometimes big goals can be all consuming, for me this was no exception. Relatedly, I have temporarily traded my wallet for a tote bag. Okay so how do we re-gain perspective? You go for a walk with a friend, go for dinner with another friend and do a lot of talking and dreaming about the future. I did a lot of that this week. It also left me with minimal patience for…
Buds are appearing on trees, spring is nearly here! Recently I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about the Double Diamond as a way of making every step, artefact and outcome of decision-making processes better. Some days my lunch at work is absolutely shocking and since I have been rumbled, I shall share it here: Salad-chicken, random salad deli pot, multivitamin jelly and vitamin C drink. Somehow 酒部 ended up with us at VENT. Long weekend was spent doing paperwork and - spring cleaning. Wings…
This week I spoke about AI a lot in four entirely separated contexts, and got to run an architecture session I’ve waited a few months for. Pretty good. Our faustian pact is back. And because of it, I had to say a few…
Like the sequence in every good heist movie, I’m doing the rounds and reassembling the brain trust. What’s the job? Stealing something precious from someone who first stole from me. Hosted a departmental all-hands and the time-keeping was ギリギリ. Since it was last thing on Friday, I closed it with the bit I’ve wanted to do since joining this company: “Have a Good Week-End!” Now the proud owner of a Trader Joe's tote bag. Thanks Danny. One of the appointments made a few weeks ago was kept: We…
