A day in the life of a Japanese indie developer
In the morning, I saw my daughter off to her school bus stop. I recently came across comedian Atsushi Tamura’s conversational nodding technique and thought it sounded interesting, so I immediately tried it out during some small talk with my mama-tomo (mom friend). The results were instant.
The method is simple: completely turn off the critical thinking mindset and pour 100% of my mental energy into active listening and nodding. I focused entirely on how to vary my responses, using things like "Ohh," "Yeah," "Hmm," and "I see." In Japanese, I say 「へぇ」「うん」「うーん」「なるほど〜」. You should really give it a shot—it helps you understand the other person's point much better, and natural follow-up questions or reactions just pop into your head more easily. It takes the pressure off because you don’t have to squeeze out an interesting story of your own. Conversations don't even need a solid conclusion; you can just wrap things up with a "Right, makes sense," "That's great," or "Alright, see you later!" In Japanese, 「そうなんですね」「いいですね」「ほんじゃお疲れ様です〜」. If you're ever stuck on how to respond, just saying "That's great" is super convenient! It works just as well when talking to guys, and I bet it's useful for interview content, too. Love it.
The weather was gloomy and I felt sluggish, so I spent some time doing mindless tasks in my room until I could find some motivation, like taking photos of receipts. Once I snap the photos, I send them off to my back-office assistant. I’ll want to replace this process with AI eventually. My receipts are pretty much exclusively from cafes lol.
I checked the user forum and saw a reply from the user who reported an Inkdrop bug yesterday. He seemed happy that we were able to track down the cause together. That's great. Moments like this are honestly one of the best parts of being an indie developer. I want to keep doing this until the day I die.
After playing with my six-month-old baby for a bit, my motivation kicked in, so I headed to a cafe. I cleared the tasks I’ve left unfinished from yesterday: adding exception handling to the AI features, maintaining plugins, and updating the manuals and API documentation. A guy sitting behind me was loudly holding forth about "how the younger generation leaves messages on 'read' (read-receipt ghosting/既読スルー)." Meanwhile, Claude Code drains the battery, so my PC is already down to half power. It completely ruins the energy efficiency of Apple Silicon. When I stepped out of the cafe, it was pouring rain. It felt nice and cool.
I took a walk through the park while figuring out where to grab lunch and decided to check out a bookstore-slash-cafe I'd been curious about: Calo Bookshop & Cafe / Calo Gallery. I ordered the chicken curry. I noticed that a lot of the books on display seemed to blend art and politics. Just as I was thinking the themes and designs of the books were a bit quirky, I realized they were ZINEs. That made total sense. The curry was good. Only one other customer came in during my stay, and he left quickly. By the time I walked out, the rain had stopped. Time to head back.
The atmospheric low pressure is making me feel heavy. My eldest daughter was already home from kindergarten, and I ended up taking a whole one-hour nap. That was unexpected, hmm. She then left for her gymnastics class.
Last week, one of my users Adrián shared his Claude Code Skills with me, which uses Inkdrop as a persistence layer. While checking it out, I remembered a blog post by Nolan Lawson (PouchDB author) I read yesterday titled "Using AI to write better code more slowly" and tweeted about it in Japanese. I like his point of view so much. He mentioned Matt Pocok's /grill-me , which is included in Adrián’s Skills as well.
Since Nolan runs his AI agents in parallel (Claude sub-agent, Codex, and Cursor Bugbot), I wanted to try doing that myself, so I downloaded and set up Antigravity CLI, which is a replacement for Gemini CLI. Lately, I've been really liking a Neovim plugin called codediff.nvim. I suddenly remembered that I had added a small feature to it the other day, so I sent a PR. By evening, my daughter returned from gymnastics. My focus ended—time to cook dinner.
For dinner, I boiled some pasta I bought last weekend from the Italian Fair held at the Hankyu Umeda. It was thick pasta that looked sort of like dreadlocks, and it tasted great. It makes me want to visit Italy again.
I use Claude Code in English every day, and today I learned the word "idempotent" (冪等性). For example: "Make this event handler idempotent." Meaning: make it so that no matter how many times you run this event handler, the outcome remains exactly the same. 冪等 is also a difficult word in Japanese.
Lately, I've been listening to Laura day romance almost exclusively. The literary lyrics combined with the melancholic vocals and expressions make for a really chill vibe. Tonight, I’m going to read a bit more of a polar explorer Daisuke Kakuhata’s book,The 43-Year-Old Peak Theory, and head to bed. Good night.
