Coming Back After a Year of Expatriation

One year. That's it, it's over.

One year has just passed, and I'm back in France.

One year during which I lived in Japan, soaked up the culture, enjoyed life, but also gained perspective—perspective on things that are sometimes right in front of our eyes every day but we can forget... until we don't have them anymore.

This is obviously privileged person talk and I apologize in advance, but damn, it's enriching to see other points of view, other ways of doing things, radically different cultures.

But it sure feels good to rediscover familiar brands. And oh yeah, to find real diversity in fruits, vegetables, and cheese again :)

One Year and Then It's Gone

Some might ask me, okay but why write a blog post about this?

Well first, because it's my blog, it's personal, I do what I want. It's primarily a notebook for myself, even though I'm thrilled when some articles resonate with people.

And maybe also to emphasize that our viewpoints are all created through a lens—the lens of our cultures, our traditions.

I know this is painfully obvious to say. Yet we tend to quickly forget that filter bubbles aren't just about digital algorithms. A country is a filter bubble.

Actually, to complete the experience, we stopped in Australia on our way back, and what a shock that was too.

Sydney is definitely in my top 3, maybe even my #1 most beautiful cities in the world.

Obviously, maybe this feeling also comes from the fact that Sydney meant getting our hearing and sight back.

After a year, understanding what people are saying on the street again, being able to read signs, newspapers, subway ads again—what a liberation!

Fun fact: Sydney is also symbolic for me because it's indirectly the trigger that made me go freelance in 2009, and therefore it's also the starting point for creating Lateral-Thoughts and then Malt.

When I say indirectly, I need to explain a bit.

In 2009, Atlassian, the Australian software company, posted a job opening. It was the first time their recruitment was open to foreigners.

The final position was in Sydney, but the hiring process could be done from anywhere.

I knew their products really well back then, I had made plugins for Jira and Confluence, and looking back, the company was pretty hot in 2009.

So I applied.

I passed two rounds successfully and failed the third—a technical phone interview in English. I was bad at English back then, but I'll be honest, that's not why I failed. I bombed on stuff I should have known.

It was a wake-up call for me. I realized I was stagnating, maybe even regressing, and I needed to get out of my comfort zone.

I'll skip the details since it's not the main point here, but that wake-up call had a butterfly effect on the rest of my career.

Anyway, this year in 2025, I had the chance to visit Atlassian's offices in Sydney.

Well, I tried. I went to their building. I figured maybe I could at least get into the lobby.

But the offices are accessed through an elevator that requires a badge.

So 16 years later, I still haven't managed to get inside Atlassian, not even for a visit ;)

Anyway, I saw Australia after a year in Japan and a detour through Taiwan.

What a series of mind-blowing experiences!

I often say this, but tech isn't virtual. Tech is built within geographical and cultural boundaries.

For example, the tech ecosystems in Japan and Taiwan have deep roots in hardware, electronics, or simply in the physical, tangible world.

All those "universal" apps we use in Europe aren't as universal as we think.

You'll find alternatives (Line instead of WhatsApp for example), app ecosystems (WeChat in China, Kakao in Korea) that are hugely popular yet virtually unknown in Europe.

Living abroad also makes you realize that some apps are region-locked for us. For instance, Line is restricted for Europeans since you need a local phone number to access all features, payment apps are also unavailable (at least I couldn't get PayPay to work). And sometimes certain apps aren't even available on European app stores.

Yeah, because in case you didn't know, app stores (the App Store or Play Store) are localized by geographic region.

Anyway, tech is diverse and often reflects borders, culture, usage patterns, or constraints. I invite you to browse Asian websites to understand what I mean. They're very colorful, information-heavy, and generally unreadable for someone used to the very clean style of Western web design.

But once you've looked at that type of site, I invite you to then walk into a store in Japan—for example, the Yodabashi in Akihabara, one of the biggest electronics, Hi-Fi, multimedia stores in Tokyo.

Well, it's chaotic, very colorful, and information-heavy.

These websites aren't just different for the sake of it. They reflect reality. Or rather, a variation of reality.

Of course, these variations of reality, these different ways of living are already fascinating to observe firsthand. But I won't hide that understanding these same variations through the lens of my profession adds an extra kick.

But now, it's time to return to my reality.

Back to Business

First observation: reality hits hard.

I've been back for 6 days and a house deteriorates quickly in a year. Things have broken, a boiler that doesn't work anymore, nature has taken over big time, work to plan, mail to sort through, including a bailiff's letter for a water bill that I didn't rack up since I was away...

But that's okay, it's part of the game.

That's not the hard part of readjusting.

No, the real tough question is... what's next?

Just as a reminder, I left the company I created just before going to Japan. It wasn't a clean break since I remained connected to the company as a shareholder on one hand, and because it's still my baby anyway.

But it's still a departure.

And leaving a company you co-founded after 12 years means going from a calendar that looks like Tetris level 90 to... nothing. An empty calendar.

I didn't feel it because I went to Japan, which was an excellent transition to dodge that rapid descent.

But now I'm back and I need to figure out what's next.

Did this experience help me see things more clearly?

What was I able to do and learn along the way?

Well, Japan was great for bridging two eras, but it was also a period where everything was essentially on hold.

I could barely keep in touch with my professional network. I wasn't planning to settle in Japan, but at the same time, I was too far away to work with people here.

So I was stuck between a rock and a hard place, to put it bluntly.

But now it's time for the review, and time to restart.

And with that perspective, I'm going to list my different projects.

• hakanai.io

The product's growth stalled over the last 2 months. It's time to reactivate my development environment to get it going again.

The tool becomes more mature each month. But I've been dragging my feet on marketing for a year and I realize this part doesn't motivate me much.

It's frustrating. But not demoralizing. It's progressing. Slowly. But that was expected.

I chose the hard path by taking a B2C software targeting individual bloggers, a population that's pretty broke by nature. I did some small studies and concluded that my current target (my persona) isn't necessarily the right one. But I'll probably talk about that another time.

This means I'm still far from a real "product market fit."

Yes, I said Product Market Fit. I've improved my English since Atlassian.

• Bloggrify

This open source project is living its life well. I know it's being used, it attracts a few thousand visits per month, but I get little feedback and so far few contributors.

Anyway, it works well and I'm planning some more improvements like native multilingual support.

The project doesn't need to grow infinitely either—it's also important to know how to just maintain it as is so it doesn't become overly complex.

It remains a passion project in open source, and I don't have any particular plans for it.

• This blog (and its French version).

The blog is naturally pretty simple to maintain. It didn't suffer much from the past year in Japan. The main issue was getting back into good habits. Which is what this blog post is about. Writing is above all a matter of routine, and what you're reading is the equivalent of an engine restarting.

• The YouTube channels (eventuallycoding and eventuallycoding - sous le capot).

That's the project that particularly excites me since the beginning of last year. It's fun to do, sometimes frustrating because I can go from 400 views to 33,000 without really understanding why.

Well, I have some ideas and I need to learn from it. We can talk about that, maybe.

It takes a lot of time, much more than the blog, but with a significantly greater impact, and it gives me ideas.

It's true that at first glance, this project doesn't seem very serious. Just the word YouTuber is sometimes a bit loaded, and you might think, "what's he getting into?"

Well, to give some answers: first, I find the medium suited to its era for talking about subjects that interest me, whether it's sharing part of the experience gained these past years, but also putting tech in the context of our society, talking about its uses, challenges, and sometimes its excesses.

It's also refreshing to do something else, so different from what I've done before that it prevents comparison. Because let's be clear, when you create a startup like Malt, it's not easy to replicate the experience and it puts a certain pressure because nobody wants to think they can never do as well as what they've already done.

This is... different. There's a lot to learn again. And above all, it's fun.

So yes, I wouldn't be against pushing the experience further. If it were possible, I'd like to make it a media outlet, like some predecessors before me—Korben for example who stayed with the written format, or Micode and the underscore channel.

Making it a media outlet means I'd like to work as a team, have frequent collaborations, and eventually I'd like to create a small community (a bit like Le Vortex) to do popularization, awareness-raising, and vary the themes.

Anyway, it's ambitious. I don't know if I'll have the necessary patience because we're talking about a multi-year project before reaching some critical mass.

In Japan, I was somewhat blocked on certain aspects. Coming back to France, I'm going to resume the pace starting in September and try to see how to move the project forward.

What's certain is that it doesn't guarantee any reliable and stable income for a while, so I'll need to explore other avenues in parallel.

Obviously, the question we might ask at this point is: does all this pay the bills?

And the answer is: obviously not.

I've had plenty of discussions alongside all this over recent months—interesting projects, others less so, subjects I felt capable of handling and others not at all. All of this is obviously full of possibilities, but choosing means giving up other options.

And for now, it's a bit early to choose.

Anyway, I'm back in business, back in Lyon, and I'm going to take time to restart all of this.

And I can't wait.

See ya!