I didn’t write one of these last year, so I’ll touch on last year a bit too while I’m at it.
University
I graduated from university in March 2024 and went straight on to graduate school. Nothing particularly changed once I moved up to grad school, and somehow graduation is already right around the corner. The one event worth mentioning (and it’s fair to say it’s the only one) is that my advisor transferred in March 2025, which meant the lab I belonged to physically disappeared from the university. Along with that, my affiliation moved to the Systems Software Laboratory, the parent lab of the lab I’d belonged to. Personally I was quite positive about this move — I ended up talking about all kinds of computer stuff around the lab, and my circle of friends grew out of that too.
Graduating should (probably) be fine, but first I need to submit my master’s thesis. The thesis deadline is five days away, but I’ll probably manage somehow…
Work
From 2024 into 2025 I got to do hands-on internships (mostly around a month each) at a lot of companies. I kept my base in the areas called infrastructure, Platform Engineering, and SRE, while doing whatever was needed — frontend, backend, data platforms, anything.
In the end I accepted a job offer from one of those companies, and I’ll start working full-time as a software engineer next April. I’ll be on a team that looks after company-wide CI/CD infrastructure and DX (Developer Experience) tooling. In practice I think it’s close to a Platform Engineering team. I started a pre-employment part-time internship n months ago, and I’m currently having a really good time working there.
I feel like there are an incredible number of talented people, and people I’d already thought were talented turned out to be in the same team or department, which makes for a very stimulating environment. I’ll go full-time starting in April, so I want to keep working just as hard.
OSS, Community, and So On
It started with the CNCJ (CNCF’s Japan regional community) kickoff event, which I wandered into at the end of 2023. That made me want to try doing something myself, so I started contributing in a small way. I put in a fair amount of effort especially in 2024, and I actually got mentioned by name a few times in Japan’s CNCF DevStats 2024. I also had my name and face introduced during the KubeCon Japan keynote.
In 2025 I did a bit less hands-on work myself, and I feel like I mostly acted as a reviewer and maintainer — looking at PRs that had stalled, helping new contributors get onboarded, and generally trying to raise the community’s sustainability. I still did some hands-on work too, though — contributing to PipeCD, and chipping away at the kind of maintenance work that tends to get left neglected, like updating the now-legacy Hugo setup and modules on sites I maintain.
As for speaking, the big ones were the panel discussions I was invited to at KubeCon Japan and Open Source Summit Japan. Both were given in English, and while it was an incredibly valuable experience, it also became (as I’ll get into below) motivation to work harder on my English. Besides that, I also gave a short presentation at what might have been a co-located event of Open Source Summit Japan. That short presentation looks back on my community activities over the past two years, so check it out if you’re interested.
Almost all of my technical talks were internal or private, and I feel like I’ve done pretty much no external output. I don’t intend to set a concrete numerical goal, but not writing anything isn’t interesting either, so I want to improve on that a little next year.
English
Turns out English is absolutely essential at the company I’m joining — the main language used within my team and department is English. I have zero background in English and this is also my first time working in an English-speaking environment, so I’m frantically studying as we speak.
On top of that, I’ve had chances to speak/present in English at KubeCon Japan, Open Source Summit Japan (and a few other events), and while I get by well enough, I do feel that the language limits what I want to say and how I communicate. Especially at KubeCon, there were tons of moments where I thought “if I could speak English, I could’ve joined the discussion more,” and that’s become even more motivation to work harder on English.
People tend to assume that because I do things like translating Kubernetes/website, I must be good at English, but it’s actually the exact opposite — my motivation for starting that contribution was “I don’t have the brain capacity to read the official docs in English, so I’d rather translate the pages I need into Japanese first.”
That said, for the reasons I just wrote, work won’t function if I can’t read, write, and converse in English, and I don’t want to keep accepting the opportunity cost of not being able to speak it, so I’ve steeled myself and started studying. I’m using the Callan Method, and I feel like I can speak better than when I started.
I have a faint hope that generative AI and various other technologies might make language learning unnecessary before too long, but English is something I just have to work at myself, so I want to keep at it.
2026
Above all, I’ll finally be working as a member of society, so I plan to enjoy it and do my best without pushing myself too hard. I think I’ll keep showing up here and there in OSS and at conferences too, so I hope to keep seeing you all around.
Wishing you a happy new year.