my head

Hi 👋, I’m François

I’m a French engineer who moved to Japan after my studies and will soon hit half of my life spent in Tokyo.

  • Launching a SaaS application – EpicForge.app

    Launching a SaaS application – EpicForge.app

    Shipping a real paid SaaS app for the first time can be really emotional.

  • Running my local dev environment with SSL & domain names

    Running my local dev environment with SSL & domain names

    An up-to-date setup guide to run a dev environment with test domain names and SSL on Apple Silicon and MacOS Sequoia.

  • Django and WhiteNoise on Coolify

    Django and WhiteNoise on Coolify

    How to fix the default run command for Django apps on Coolify/Nixpacks to run collectstatic and fix your 404 errors.

  • Hosting a Django/NextJS monorepo webapp on Coolify

    Hosting a Django/NextJS monorepo webapp on Coolify

    Coolify has settings to host backend and frontend resources from the same repo without having to mess with manual docker-compose setup.

  • Debunking Japanese dual-nationality myths with code

    Debunking Japanese dual-nationality myths with code

    Every single post on Japan-related subreddits that mentions someone is binational will have a bunch of commenters jump in to say it’s illegal, OP needs to hide it or they will be made to renounce as soon as they turn 20. While this is true for people who naturalized to a foreign nationality, it’s patently…

  • Zip R2 Objects in Memory with Cloudflare Workers

    Zip R2 Objects in Memory with Cloudflare Workers

    It seems like a super basic thing you’d want to do with Cloudflare Workers when you store files in R2, but I’ve googled far and wide and couldn’t find an example of this anywhere. So here’s my take on this, after much trial and error: You can just POST to it a JSON object with…

  • Simple Japanese Inheritance Calculator

    Simple Japanese Inheritance Calculator

    I made a thing again! If you’re like me, a foreigner in your 40s living in Japan, the thought of dealing with inheritance taxes for your parents back home can be daunting. Understanding how these taxes might be applied is essential. To help with this, I created an app: Japanese Inheritance Tax Calculator. Here are…

  • Cost Breakdown of a Birth in Tokyo

    Cost Breakdown of a Birth in Tokyo

    In June 2021, my wife and I were extremely happy to welcome our first son into the world. I know many people express curiousness towards the costs involved with delivery in Japan as the system of it not being covered by health insurance but also somewhat covered by various subventions from the national and local…

  • Starting a business – part 1

    Since the start of the year Fumina and I have been playing with the idea of starting an outbound online shop—selling Japanese products to customers abroad. Last month we finally launched Chuchulu and it’s proven to be quite an interesting adventure. Finding a product The first step was to find a product category: It had…

  • REAL TALK 🇯🇵

    I appreciate the transparency effort of giving average monthly overtime at your company in a Job Description for recruitment. But how can you write down “40 to 70 hours” and not think “we have a problem” ?

  • Feature requests

    The key is to ignore the feature request, and focus on the problem. Users don’t come to you with problems, they come to you with shitty solutions. You need to take their solution, reverse engineer their real problem from that, then work out a good solution for that problem that fits well with your product.…

  • #5yearsago

    5 years ago today I am in the Yamanote line going to an interview for what is to become my current job. The shaking hits as we are pulling in to the platform at Shinjuku station. I brace myself as the car sways to what feels like 30º angles and people standing don’t know if they should jump out or jump…

  • Social Status

    Most people want to become wealthy so they can consume social status. Japanese employers believe this is inefficient, and simply award social status directly. Doing Business in Japan – Kalzumeus Software

  • Pareidoloop

    http://iobound.com/pareidoloop/ – Evolving a human face out of randomly drawn polygons using face recognition algorithms.

  • Bicycle

    Bicycle

    A picture taken with my new camera on my bike while cruising my neighborhood’s back streets on the weekend.