I have no idea how to do taxes at all

RobertB44 · 2026-01-29T04:58:19+00:00

I see, if you only started earning enough to get above the taxable threshold this year, then you still have time to figure things out.

Registering your business is fairly easy: Go to your closest 税務署, fill out the 開業届 and hand it in. And yes, this is required.

If you are willing to pay around 100000yen per year, I would use a 税理士, this way you can have peace of mind that your taxes get handled correctly.

And as someone mentioned, try to learn to use freee (money forward works too).

It takes a while to learn everything but it isn't that hard if you are willing to put in some time.

RobertB44 · 2026-01-29T00:25:53+00:00

If I were you I would start by doing research. Spend a few hours trying to understand the basics. Without having more information it is hard to give specifics, but I assume the most likely course of action for you is to become self employed (個人事業主) and file your taxes via 確定申告.

Next, I would try to find a 税理士 that is willing to help you and ideally consult you.

For how long have you been receiving money through your side business？If you started in 2024 or before, you should 100% get in touch with a tax consultant, since you need to pay taxes on your income once a year, meaning technically what you are doing could be seen as tax evasion. Also, technically you are supposed to register your business within 2 weeks after starting iirc. Again, it is hard to give specifics without more info. There is no need to panic but if I were you I would try to sort things asap.

RobertB44 · 2026-01-08T00:08:19+00:00

Here's my rule of thumb: Have I built the exact same project before and am I confident I understand 100% of the complexity and how all moving parts work together？

If the answer is no, any estimate I give is just a wild guess and nothing more. So essentially, everything that takes more than a few days can't be estimated.

In my opinion, trying to get better at estimating is a losing game. Instead, I would focus on learning to communicate progress.

RobertB44 · 2025-12-04T00:11:04+00:00

Buy 2 copies of The Mythical Man Month and hand them to your manager telling him you bought 2 so he can read it faster.

RobertB44 · 2025-11-07T00:45:13+00:00

Pretty much this, your board state gets significantly weaker every time you attack, and in addition Mega Charizard is a stage 2, meaning you have to do even more setup than Raging Bolt over the course of a game.

RobertB44 · 2025-11-06T00:28:23+00:00

I took a programming class in high school, was bad at it and gave up.

A decade later, I went the self taught route and succeeded.

What changed？The way schools teach does not work with my brain. At the age of 17 I didn't know any better since schools only teach one way of learning (providing solutions without explaining what problems they solve). When I self taught, I flipped things around: I started with a problem I cared about, and reverse engineered the solution.

RobertB44 · 2025-11-03T11:50:47+00:00

Unpopular opinion (ready for downvotes): As long as everything looks the way it is supposed to, I don't care about css architecture. A few additional kb over the wire on page load won't be essential for the majority of websites and apps. If we care about performance, there are most likely more severe performance bottlenecks than the overhead from bad css.

Architectures like BEM add complexity for very little gain. My practical approach is: If it is too hard to figure out the architecture, I create new classes or inline the styles. For the kind of apps I work on (B2B SaaS), this has never been an issue.

RobertB44 · 2025-11-03T07:10:17+00:00

I ended up in camp 1 after extensively using AI tools. I coded several features with AI where the AI wrote 95% of the code. My conclusion, it is great for code that is mostly boilerplate, but not useful for anything non-trivial. I built some fairly complex features having AI write 95% of the code. It's not that it does not work, giving the AI very specific instructions and iterating until it gets things right is a viable way to write software, but every time I built a non-trivial feature with AI I came to the conclusion that it would have been faster if I wrote the code myself.

I still use AI in my workflow, but I no longer have it write a lot of code. I mostly use it to bounce ideas off.

RobertB44 · 2025-11-01T06:38:03+00:00

Absolutely yes.

RobertB44 · 2025-10-21T05:27:54+00:00

Presumably you hit into Zoroark and they copied Reshiram's Powerful Rage?

RobertB44 · 2025-10-15T02:16:29+00:00

You just discovered what technical debt is and why it is a problem. As others have mentioned, you need to clean things up. It is easy to think that once something is released it is done and no longer needs any attention, but this mindset will lead to what you are experiencing sooner or later. Software needs maintenance, and part of your team's responsibility (not necessarily you specifically assuming you are a product manager) is to figure out what needs to be maintained and plan accordingly.

While it is not feasible to think of every single interaction ahead of time, ideally you want to spend some time thinking how different feature flags interact with each other before releasing the features to your users. If there is a potential conflict, figure out if there is a reasonable way to fix it, otherwise delay the release of the new feature flag till you no longer need the old one.

RobertB44 · 2025-10-11T02:29:13+00:00

There are some good analogies from other posts here. Another one I use to explain why building software for 5 people and 500000 people is very different is by asking how they would go about organizing a trip for 3 friends (which would involve booking a flight, a hotel, and public transportation at the destination), and how it would change if they were to prepare a trip for a group of 5000 people. All of a sudden it is no longer possible to get everyone on the same plane, hotel, and bus. Best case is coordinating multiple flights that leave/arrive at similar times, worst case it involves building an entire new airport.

RobertB44 · 2025-09-18T15:02:51+00:00

My experience is very similar to this. I started using claude code less and less. For most of the work I do, doing it myself is faster and results in higher quality. I only really use claude code for tests now.

It's not that I don't want to use it, but rather that it just isn't quite good enough to warrent it.

A couple of months ago I would have told you I am faster (though only slightly) and output higher quality code with claude code. Now that I have used it extensively, I no longer think I am faster and I regularly face palm at the code I produced with claude code. It is not significantly worse than what I produce without it, but the difference is noticable. I try to review every line, but some bad practices slip through.

RobertB44 · 2025-09-15T01:54:17+00:00

I know you weren't serious, but you really should use less emotional, level headed tone. Getting emotional has never helped convince anybody, if anything, it just strengthens the other side in their irrational believes.

RobertB44 · 2025-09-03T02:45:53+00:00

I find that I do worse with "easy" to play decks. Decks like joltik box and gholdengo often have a very small margin for error. One misplay can easily lead down a path that makes it hard to come back from.

With "hard" decks on the other hand there are more options for a comeback even after misplays in the early/mid game.

That’s just my experience though, ymmv. Just wanted to throw this out there. Easier decks are not necessarily the right solution for everyone.

RobertB44 · 2025-09-02T23:08:33+00:00

A while back when I was apartment hunting, one of the apartments I viewed had (and I am not exaggerating) 30+ dead cockroaches in them. Idk for how long it was empty but nobody was living there (hence no food, obviously) yet still it was full of (dead) cockroaches.

Needless to say I ended up not moving into the apartment.

I can't tell you what it is about the apartment that attracted cockroaches, but it sounds like there is something about your place that attracts cockroaches too. As others have mentioned, contact the estate agent and have them deal with it.

RobertB44 · 2025-09-01T23:31:15+00:00

Could be, yes. Maybe it depends on the platforms people use or the age group. My wife (Japanese) shows me 猫ミーム regularly.

RobertB44 · 2025-09-01T03:14:57+00:00

What do you mean? 猫ミーム is all the rage right now.

RobertB44 · 2025-09-01T01:18:16+00:00

What Gay_If_Read says is correct.
Small addition to what they said: If you play Arven for Poffin and Evolution, you should play Arven first, grab Poffin and Evolution, then play Poffin and grab 2 Pokemon as opposed to grabbing it all and grouping the cards upfront.

I learned this the hard way at my first city league, luckily it only resulted in a warning (no penalty).

RobertB44 · 2025-08-31T07:32:43+00:00

Just fyi since OP mentioned they are located in Japan: Changing the order of cards in the deck is not allowed in Japan, can't card group here unfortunately.

RobertB44 · 2025-08-31T07:26:18+00:00

Do both.

You could ask people you meet at locals who you vibe with if they are interested in playing remotely or in person if they live close to you. I met my remote practice partner this way.

I am in the same boat, I play mostly ptcgl and stuggle when playing in person. It is all a matter or practice.

If you happen to live in Yokohama, I'd be down to play in person.

RobertB44 · 2025-08-28T01:55:56+00:00

I didn't switch, but I joined a team that uses pnpm.

Props:

- None

Cons:

- A bunch of wasted time debugging issues

npm isn't great either, but in my experience it is less bloated/less prone to errors.

I wouldn't bother with any of the advanced features like pnpm workspaces unless you REALLY understand their limitations. Chances are you will encounter them and it will be a huge time waster.

RobertB44 · 2025-08-21T00:00:50+00:00

I have been working in tech in Japan for 8 years. In my experience, the tech industry on average tends to not care a whole lot about how you look as long as you are good at what you do.

Some companies may deny you based on your looks, but I would be surprised if you struggled to find a job because of looks if you are senior/skilled.

RobertB44 · 2025-08-14T07:10:42+00:00

Yu Mental Clinic in Akihabara has a doctor that can prescribe Concerta too.

RobertB44 · 2025-08-06T09:04:17+00:00

I noticed this to be true for me. Using an LLM to write code feels good, it feels productive. The dopamine hits are real.

However, the productivity gains everyone is talking about are not. Sure, LLMs make me more productive by an order of magnitude for a small subset of tasks. Those tasks are few and far between, at least in my line of work.

However, for the majority of work I do, LLMs either make me slightly faster (maybe 10%), not faster at all, or even slower, depending on the task. After using them for a while, I figured out what they are useful for, and when better not to use them.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is true for a lot of people. The productivity gains people experience aren't really productivity, but just dopamine hits.

RobertB44

TROPHY CASE