The project I mostly work on these days involves a webpack build process that takes about 30 seconds to complete. That is long enough that I don’t want to just stare at the screen waiting for it to finish, but also not long enough that I want to get seriously involved in doing something else.

My previous solution to this situation was to look at Twitter. I could read a few tweets, and then get back to whatever it was that I was doing. But then Twitter rolled out their new design that is uhhh…. bad, and I’ve lost interest in using the site.

The question then becomes what do I replace Twitter with during this short downtime? Instagram would be a logical substitute, but I decided maybe it would make more sense to simply get out of the habit of just passively consuming social media content.

I’ll be going to Japan in October, so I started learning some basic Japanese. As just about anyone will tell you, while Westerners do face the challenge of learning a grammar that has a different set of assumptions baked into it compared to Latin origin languages, the really challenging thing to learn is reading Japanese.

So I started writing a very rough command line tool in Python to learn the Hiragana and Katakana characters. Using this I can work on memorizing these different characters while webpack does its thing in another tab in the terminal.

I have to admit I feel somewhat bad developing this thing. There are so many tools and resources for learning Japanese available that it is totally overwhelming for the newcomer. So it feels wrong to add yet another thing to the massive pile. But this works really well for my work flow so I can only ask for forgiveness in case anyone comes across this language aid I’ve selfishly developed. 失礼しました！