Introducing my weird self with the launch of my English site

I’ve launched an English version of my site, in addition to my Japanese one.

Let me tell you why I launched an English site, and let me introduce myself a little bit.

How my site runs

My site runs on Ruby on Rails with Parklife, which can statically build Rack-based apps. I used to use Hugo, but migrated to this combination after being inspired by Ben Sheldon’s post: Living Parklife with Rails, coming from Jekyll | Island94.org.
Thanks to Rails, internationalizing the site was somewhat straightforward.

Why an English site

Why launch an English site?

Well, I started posting on Bluesky in English after what happened to Twitter, and was able to gain followers from outside Japan.
I wanted to do the same with my site.

My self-introduction

Let me introduce myself.

I’m a 40-year-old man as of August 2025, and I’ve kind of lived quite a unique life. That’s why I call myself “weird programmer”.

Like I wrote on history page, I dropped out of high school at 16 and became a shut-in, never leaving my parents’ house for almost 10 years. It is called hikikomori in Japan and it has been a serious social problem even for now.
I played tons of video games in English during that time and that made me somewhat fluent in English.

With the help of a support worker my parents brought, I was finally able to leave the house.
I enrolled in correspondence high school at 26, and the teacher in that school guided me to an information technology college.
I studied very hard by myself in that period and got several national qualifications and graduated from the college at 29.

After I experienced a few companies as non full-time employees, I joined GMO Pepabo, Inc as a full-time employee at 34. The company is highly regarded as a tech company in Japan. I experienced a lot of things there operating hosting services.
Now I belong to SmartHR, Inc. and I’m developing human resources services.

As for programming, I now mainly write Ruby and Rails for my jobs and I like how the language respects programmer’s responsibility.
I also like Go for its simplicity and made some tools with it.

As for my personal life, I’m a husband and father of two. My family is the most precious thing and purpose in my life.
I couldn’t believe this happy situation when I was hikikomori in my dark room. Life is strange…

Conclusion

I’m happy you took an interest in me and read this far.

I hope to post occasionally about various topics here.
See you soon!