Introducing my weird self with the launch of my English site
Date: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!
Takayuki Nagatomi (永冨 隆之)
I have lived in Fukuoka, Japan since I was born in 1985. I dropped out of high school in my first year, then became a hikikomori. During that time, I played a lot of video games in English, which helped me become proficient in the language and achieve a TOEIC score of 960—a highly regarded achievement in Japan.
A teacher suggested that since I was good at English, I might also excel at programming, as both involve working with languages. Taking this advice, I enrolled in an information technology college at age 26.
I'm a weird programmer who started my career as a software engineer at 30.
I'm also a husband and father of two, and my family is the most precious thing in my life.
Currently: Product Engineer at SmartHR, Inc.