Emma Goto

Emma Goto

@emmago.to

Software engineer living in Tokyo 🗼 tinkering on my blog @ emgoto.com and hiking Japan's mountains one peak at a time ⛰️ Currently taking a break from full-time work, but on the side I'm also helping build @hardcover.app 📚

739 followers164 following648 posts

New feature on the blog - since I store position coordinates for a lot of my blog posts, I've extended the "read more" section at the bottom to include spots that are nearby ☕ ⛰️

You can also see all the places I visited on this map! www.emgoto.com/map/izu/ Tbh if I didn't have the map I probably would have just done 1 post for the whole thing and called it a day. But the map weirdly incentivises me to want to properly mark down all the places that I've been.

I integrated my blog with bubbles.town - now there's a little bubble emoji down in the comments section of my posts. ... the one downside is that you need a Mastodon account to do any sort of upvoting on it 😅

I was a bit jealous of the Bear community as they had a built-in feed where all bear bloggers could congregate (bearblog.dev/discover/), so it felt like perfect timing to stumble upon Bubbles, which does the same thing. Unsure how useful it'll be? For now I'll keep it on my blog and see how it goes

My first cherry tomatoes of the season! Didn’t think I could do this on an apartment balcony in Tokyo so this is pretty exciting

The main problem I had with this was that I had a programming section that was dark mode, and then a books section that was light mode. To be honest I was quite fond of them as they were but I thought maybe for consistency's sake it would be nice to be able maintain the same mode across the blog.

As part of this, I also graduated my coffee posts (since I have 22 of them now) onto their own section on my blog - yay! Previously they all just lived underneath my notes. It's now a nice and even 8 sections on the site so lets hope I don't have plans to add any more.

I've also been playing around a bit with the design of my hiking pages - have added a new summary section to the top of the page, so readers who are interested in hiking it can get the most useful info straight away.

Random thing that I vibe-coded recently - when I open a new tab in my browser, it opens an editable week note page for the current week. Behind-the-scenes it's just displaying a file from @obsidian.md - a bit handier than having to switch windows, and it automatically makes a new file each week.

After 8 years at Atlassian, I was one of the 1600 people laid off today. Although there had been rumours brewing lately, it was still an absolutely surreal email to receive this morning. Going to enjoy a bit of a break, do some more hiking, and then figure out what's next!

I had this vision in my head for a while now for what my Map page should look like and I think I'm kind of there now! You can now filter by location and category, which could be handy e.g. if you are looking for hikes to do in a specific area 👀 🗺️ www.emgoto.com/map/

I've done quite a good job of visiting various bits of Japan, but you might notice the top end of the Tohoku is looking quite bare - I had plans to visit Iwate in 2025 but that got rained out, and I have done two hikes in Aomori back in 2023 which I still need to put up on the blog 😅

Latest update on the blog - I added a search bar ✨ My book reviews section is the only non-dark mode section of my blog so I had to get it (mostly) working for two colour schemes. I need to get around to properly doing dark/light mode across the site sometime.

It snowed overnight in Tokyo. One of my goals for February was to get a photo of a warbling white-eye or "mejiro" (they are so cute!) ... and then there were a couple flitting about in the snow-covered bushes right outside my apartment which made things pretty easy 😂