As I wrote about in February, Ash and I are traveling to Japan for three months (May → August). It's a trip I've always wanted to take, and since I'm between work engagements I've been taking some time to prepare.

Three months is a long time to spend in a country you've never visited, and I'm going to go over a few ways we've been preparing.

I've been fascinated by Japan since I was a teenager. Thanks to Hayao Miyazaki (among others) the food, landscape, and architecture all exist in some dreamy, liminal space in my mind alongside wood sprites and lost civilizations.

Maybe it sounds daft, but the idea of actually visiting the country always seemed like it would break the spell somehow? Like anywhere, Japan has crime, social problems, bad weather, and if I go, me.

Supabase is a collection of backend services (Postgres, PostgREST auth service, S3 storage, function runtime) that you can develop against locally and then deploy to production.

They don't yet provide a fully integrated background job running system. This post shows a detailed example of how you might keep your stack slim and build a system like this for yourself in Supabase, rather than using a third party!

It's kind of a classic developer mistake to build a blog before they start writing. As Jeff Triplett writes:

"Write and publish before you write your own static site generator or perfect blogging platform. We have lost billions of good writers to this side quest because they spend all their time working on the platform instead of writing."

This is good advice. I am just preternaturally incapable of following it.

I'm still putting things together here, but I've got an about page that gives a brief summary of who I am.