I agree with Leon and Colin. There's a lot to unpack in both of these posts and I agree with all of it. But I'll chime in my 2.2 yen anyways.

The masses aren't going to adopt their own websites instead of visiting and posting on one of the large social networks. That's a feature, not a bug.

An interconnected IndieWeb the size of Twitter would present each user with the opportunity to filter and moderate the dregs of internet. That's something I'm not interested in and I doubt many on the IndieWeb today would be either.

The utility of the IndieWeb technology is that it helps us find and connect to like minded people in a decentralized matter. But still, discovery is still not solved. Without micro.blog (and perhaps the IndieWeb WebRing ) we'd all be blogging alone. And without the IndieWeb community, I'm not sure if I'd even be blogging, let alone building my own engine.

We should do everything we can to lower the barrier of entry to participate in the IndieWeb. Getting started with Wordpress is confusing because, as Colin says, it's not native. There's Wordpress Post Kinds and there's IndieWeb Post Kinds. How do they interact? Why's there two? You need to select one of a couple of microformatted themes and hope you don't break the formats if you try to customize it. Plugins conflict and break randomly (more of a general Wordpress issue). Data's stored in opaque formats (do you own the data if you can't really re-use it?).

The standards for UX have risen a lot over the past decade. Being able to participate with a single click in software that is native to the IndieWeb is table-stakes for growing the community beyond it's current size or rate. And it needs to be hosted, because most people aren't capable of or have interest in maintaining their own server.

That hooks into my dilemma with Tanzawa. My goal is to make an IndieWeb native blogging engine that's easy to use is achievable. Provide people with clean apis and transparent / logical data formats so they can use their data how they want. I can do that. I'll get there one step at a time.

But hosting? I want people to use my software, but I'm not sure I want to start a niche hosting company just to improve the UX of being on the IndieWeb.

This is written in the docs, but it was a first time for me to handle. Your templates can start to get very verbose when you really start supporting i18n support. 

For strings directly in your templates you can use the blocktrans plural tag. ( Note this changes a bit with Django 3.2, blocktrans becomes blocktranslate ).

{% load i18n %}
{% blocktrans count counter=object_list|length %}
{{ object_list }}件
{% plural %}
{{ object_list }}件
{% endblocktrans %}

For master data that has a dedicated DB column, you can use the get_language_code from the i18n package.

{% get_current_language as LANGUAGE_CODE %}
{% if LANGUAGE_CODE != "en" %}
    {{ my_model.foo }}
{% else %}
    {{ my_model.foo_en }}
{% endif %}

Despite my undying love for my mid-2014, I've been itching for a new computer for the better part of a year. I really like this idea that Vincent has setup working: a beefy Intel NUC PC running Linux to handle Docker etc.. and uses VSCode to develop on it from his Mac.

I've heard of people doing this before, but they're usually using a terminal for all of their development on a server in the cloud.

While I'm reluctant to use VSCode (because I'm still not sure I trust Microsoft yet), it appears a similar can also be done with PyCharm. Maybe this is the solution to my building a PC/getting a PC itch.

A bit over 4 years ago I moved back to Japan, without a stable job. I had been contracting for 3 or 4 years in the US, but a difference in time zones (GMT+9 vs GMT - 4) made that difficult to maintain. I had heard about a Python shop called BeProud and they were remote friendly.

There weren't many remote friendly companies at the time in Japan, let alone companies that specialized in Python consulting. Being full-remote friendly signaled to me that they'd have a progressive company culture where I'd fit.

It was a fun just over 4 years, my longest tenure to date. My co-workers were great, bosses nice, and the projects (mostly) fun. Work-life balance is taken seriously (I took 6-weeks of (paid) parental leave after my son was born without any issues – something that's still rare in Japan).

If you can speak Japanese and sling Python, they're a great company filled with great people.

So why leave?

Climate change. Like many, for years I've worried about climate change. But I didn't know where to begin, beyond voting for people that take it seriously and reduce flights/driving where possible. But the challenge is bigger than any individual.

The most important change society is going to need to make is is getting our emissions to net zero. As fast as we can. And the biggest leaver is changing how we power (⚡️) our society. Japan currently gets 69% of its electricity from fossil fuels. Any way I can help lower this number, beyond just changing my personal electricity, is something worth spending my time and effort doing.

Like many, while I am worried about climate change and want to help, each time I looked for how I could get involved in non-superficial ways it either required engineering or chemistry expertise that I don't have or in the wrong location or some other  factor that didn't line up. Until now.

Octopus Energy, one of Europe's largest investors in renewable energy, is a working to make a "green dent in the universe".  They do this in a number of ways:

1. As an electricity provider, they offer dynamic tariffs that move with the wholesale price of electricity. Using data science and machine learning, they then help their customers take advantage of renewables by increasing electricity usage when there's an abundance of energy on the grid (which is usually when there's a lot of renewables producing  electricity) and reduce usage when there's less abundance (and usually dirtier, fossil fuels).
2. They're generating their own green electricity that they put on the grid.
3. They sell and service electric vehicles
4. They're making green-Hydrogen as a service.

The system that powers all of this is called Kraken and they're bringing it to the US, Australia, and Japan (in partnership with Tokyo Gas), allowing customers to take advantage of cheap green energy and reduce demand when it's mostly fossil fuels. 

Starting in October, I'll  be working on the integrations that allow  Kraken to be used in Japan and helping de-carbonize Japan's electricity supply. Hopefully over the coming years this 69% will decrease.With any luck, my work will directly contribute to driving that number to 0% as quick as possible.

While I'm sad to leave BeProud and co-workers I enjoyed working for and with, the opportunity to use my skills to fight climate change in a meaningful way is not one that I could pass up. To my new co-workers, I look forward to working together to make our green dent.

I don't have a specific quote, but I quite enjoyed this talk from Aral (of Small Tech). The premise of the talk is something that most people are familiar with, free (ala Google/Twitter/FB) silos aren't free, but you pay with your privacy. ( This blog respects your privacy and doesn't track you).

But what really made me think was the chart quadrant chart comparing Open Systems and Closed Systems on Features and Experience. In the upper left Closed / Features you have the leader: Microsoft. Next to that is Closed / Experience, where Apple and Google lead.

What's in the bottom half where open systems preside? Open source can compete with features, but they often can't compete on experience. Most people care about experience more than they care about features. An entire quadrant of the chart has no competition from open systems!

And since there's no competition in from open systems on the experience front, the system is going to arch closed. In order to have an open future, open systems must compete not only on features, but also on experience as well. 

Competing on experience is increasingly difficult as more systems have some kind of hosted server component. I think about this in regards to Tanzawa on a regular basis, but I haven't figured out a model that I think would work.

Excellent post about the importance of self-hosting. It also rightfully points out that buying new hardware isn't necessarily ecological to save 20 wants. ( As we learned in Frugal Computing the lifespan of a server needs to be  10 - 20 years to offset the energy used to manufacture the computer). 

More people should self-host. I'm self-hosting where it makes sense (my blog) and paying for hosting where it doesn't (Fastmail).

Amen. (Which reminds me, I was planning on moving my server to a BSD. I should really get around to doing that).