For two months now, I’ve been working as a Ruby on Rails developer in downtown Tokyo. It’s a whole different world compared to working in anime. Instead of working from 1pm to midnight (though in bicycle distance from home), I now work regular hours 10am-7pm (though with an hour commute one-way). I still go to the gym every weekday and I still can’t manage to achieve a decent sleep schedule.

Work itself is much better. Working in anime was extremely easy. There wasn’t much to do most of the time and even when there was, it wasn’t in any form challenging. Only maybe physically, when I had to drive here and there until 3am. We could come up with ideas for new projects, but the chances of any of them getting any serious attention from superiors was (is) basically zero. All that added up into a huge incentive to quit as soon as I got a chance.

Now, as a web developer I actually spend my days solving problems, which range from “fixable in 5 minutes” to “holy shit this took me two weeks”. The codebase is outright disgusting, and since there is no senior engineer on the team (yes you read that right), I took it onto myself to propose a roadmap to upgrading and cleaning up the project.

Of course, with absolutely zero professional experience in the field and being 2-months-new to RoR (I never used it before getting hired), coming up with the right solution isn’t exactly easy. That’s what makes it all the more fun, and receiving serious attention for my suggestions makes it feel rewarding too.

Working flexible hours (I picked the 10~19 for myself), I can adjust to emergencies, I’m allowed (or even recommended) to attend seminars and expos in the field to improve, and I get to do stuff that I really like (making stuff) and find challenging.

I’m very excited where this road will lead me.