2017 Year in Review

Hello everyone, Happy New Year 2018 🎉.

Yesterday, my girlfriend and I chose to spend a very ordinary New Year’s Eve. In the morning, we each did our own things, cooked dinner at home in the evening, went for a run together, and finally coded while watching Kohaku Uta Gassen, wrapping up the last day of 2017.

At the end of every year, I try to recall the things I did, but without keeping records, only scattered fragments or incomplete memories seem to surface. Starting this year, I did a lot of tracking: attempting to log every expense, tallying my written articles, GitHub contributions, sleep hours, and so on. While these may look like mundane running logs, this data really proves its worth during year-end reviews.

Because of this, I tried compiling some of the collected data into a web page yesterday. It turned out that wrapping all of this up in a single day was far too difficult, so I only finished it earlier today. Many of the desired effects and layouts didn’t turn out ideal; I initially wanted to add fireworks, but ran out of time and had to settle for a star transition effect.

Medium

This year, I published a total of 74 articles on Medium. Honestly, the readership hasn’t been that great—I’m not sure if the headlines weren’t punchy enough or if my writing wasn’t up to par. Or maybe there just aren’t that many Traditional Chinese users on Medium. Still, even if not many people read them, I think I will keep writing.

1. Passing the JLPT N2 After Four Years of Self-Study — 7.9K

I passed both JLPT N3 and N2 this year, which checked off one of my personal goals.

I shared this article on Facebook at the time, which made it my most-viewed post, and it still receives over a hundred views every week. I know four years of self-study isn’t a short time, but this post isn’t about test-taking strategies; rather, it chronicles my entire journey from knowing absolutely nothing to where I am today through self-directed learning.

Working in Japan is one of my goals. Whether driven by curiosity about Japanese culture or wanting a glimpse into how people live and survive in Japan, these are experiences I hope to have in the future.

2. Front-End Interview Summary — 4.6K

This year, I left TripMoment and joined 17LIVE. During the transition, I interviewed with quite a few companies and organized those experiences into an article. Front-end was one of the fields I started learning after Java. Back then, my computer had only 2GB of RAM, and opening any IDE would cause it to freeze. Therefore, lightweight HTML and CSS became my top choices, and that set me on the path to where I am today.

Recently, I’ve also been trying to branch out into more diverse areas: WebGL, Canvas, and data visualization are all fields I want to explore. I also hope to master data flow management and interactions more effortlessly.

3. A Brief Discussion on Dimensionality Reduction: PCA vs. t-SNE — 1.5K

PCA is a commonly used dimensionality reduction technique in machine learning. However, because it relies on linear transformations, too much information is lost during the conversion.

This can be improved using t-SNE. t-SNE is an algorithm based on Student’s t-distribution that reduces dimensions by minimizing Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KL). Its results are better than PCA, but it is significantly slower.

4. A Comprehensive Guide to Japanese Learning Resources

Self-studying Japanese comes with many difficulties and challenges, one of which is finding quality learning resources. My approach focuses on books supplemented by online materials, and I’ve compiled quite an extensive collection of notes.

5. Japanese Service Industry Vocabulary

A compilation of commonly used terms in the Japanese service sector, which came in handy a few times when I worked part-time jobs.

6. Double 11 Carnival — Happy Birthday to Me

My birthday happens to fall on Singles’ Day (Double 11), so I can always snag some deals to treat myself (though I rarely buy much). This post recapped what I did in 2017 along with a few personal reflections.

7. Why Taiwanese People Can’t Boycott PX Mart

This article was written after the news broke about an employee dying from overwork at PX Mart. Not every individual or household has the privilege or means to boycott PX Mart. Furthermore, PX Mart provides fixed monthly subsidies to low-income families, which offers substantial and tangible help to modest-income households.

8. A Closer Look at Several APIs in Ramda

Ramda is a remarkably handy functional programming library. This post introduces some useful yet lesser-known APIs.

9. Sass Tricks You Might Not Know

Beyond nested classes and variables, Sass actually offers many great functions and use cases—such as managing z-index gracefully, accessing variables more easily, handling errors, and more, all with great results.

10. A Deep Dive into Redux and React-Redux

I’ve been using React for nearly two years now, from version 0.1x to today. In this post, I organized my takeaways on Redux and tips for working with react-redux.

Medium offers a very comfortable reading and writing experience. Although many technical posts lately seem stuck at a basic “README level,” I still like the platform overall. In particular, the image formatting and link unfurling save a ton of hassle. The back-end analytics are also clean, and the weekly summary emails make tracking stats quite convenient.

However, there are still a few drawbacks:

No native support for code blocks. If you want syntax highlighting, you have to embed GitHub Gists, but Gists can’t be viewed properly within the mobile app.
No LaTeX support. If you want math formulas, you have to export them as images yourself.

Regarding the first point, since Medium provides an API for publishing posts, I wrote a Lambda function myself that converts code blocks into Gists automatically.

I have many more posts on Medium; if you’re interested, feel free to check them out at https://medium.com/@Shurado.

Blog

My personal blog mainly hosts technical articles and novel reviews, mostly synchronized with Medium.

https://kjj6198.github.io/

Japanese Yaoya (日語八百屋)

This is a weekly newsletter I started around March of this year, and it has now accumulated over 40 issues. I’ll definitely keep it going in the future. The site costs about NT$1,020 per month to maintain (database, S3, CloudFront, etc.).

So far, it has reached 41 issues, with a total of 219 articles and notes, totaling 71,115 Chinese characters. Looking back at the results accumulated over nearly a year still feels deeply touching. It’s not some killer app—just a straightforward weekly newsletter. To borrow Saitama’s favorite line from One-Punch Man: it’s just something I do for fun.

Over the past year, I’ve also received plenty of reader feedback. Here are a few highlights:

“Diverse and interesting content! I look forward to your email every week ^0^”
“I really look forward to reading this during my Monday lunch break ❤”
“Keep it up! This initiative is truly meaningful.”
“I’ve been subscribed since the very beginning and read every single issue! You write with so much care and quality, helping me understand Japanese culture better. I hope you keep going; I’ll always support you hahaha.”

Of course, with work being busy now, there are times when I inevitably want to slack off a bit.

If you are also interested in Japanese culture, Japanese language learning, or travel, submissions are always welcome. Since the project currently generates no revenue, all I can offer in return is:

Your article will be sent to the inboxes of over 1,300 subscribers
You will be properly credited as the author
Your piece will be published on the Japanese Yaoya Medium publication
Your piece will be featured on the official Japanese Yaoya website
Becoming good friends with me

Here are the links related to Japanese Yaoya:

IT Ironman Contest Honorable Mention — An Exploration of WebGL and Three.js

This time, I wanted to take on a different kind of challenge, so I picked WebGL and Three.js—topics I had long wanted to dive into but never actually acted on. Conveniently, I also have a Computer Graphics course next semester that requires OpenGL implementation.

Although I’m not yet at a production-ready level, I learned a lot of fascinating concepts along the way, such as matrix transformations, linear interpolation, double buffering, and lighting.

GitHub

I wrote a lot of code this year as well, though I didn’t analyze it too rigorously—just pulled some data using the GitHub API.

In 2017, I made 1,205 contributions, wrote 889,516 lines of code, and deleted 357,516 lines of code. (Note: Because I sometimes forgot to ignore build bundles and node_modules, the latter two figures are somewhat inflated.)

Daily Life

There were many interesting metrics in my everyday life. Starting in early May, I began tracking my average sleep time, data stored on my iPhone, finances, and more. Let’s take a look at the data:

Average sleep duration: 5.7 hours

I’ve been sleeping way too late recently. There was a period when my routine improved to a regular schedule, but lately there’s an endless stream of tasks, paired with procrastination, so I’ve had to make up for it by burning the midnight oil. I hope to improve this in the coming year.
Daily step count: 6,716 steps

This number might not feel like much at first glance, but converted over the course of a year, that’s at least 2.45 million steps. If only my salary could grow as high as my step count XD.
Cumulative jogging distance: 73.8 km

This is probably a laughable number to show off. I decided to start running around late February, but still ended up being pretty half-hearted about it. Hopefully, the numbers I put up for 2018 look a bit more respectable.

Travel

I traveled to Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, and Tokyo this year. Visiting Japan is genuinely affordable.

Finances

My total tracked expenditure in my budgeting app this year was NT$223,935. As for my income, it wasn’t particularly impressive, so I’ll spare myself the embarrassment.

Japanese TV Dramas

I watched a lot of Japanese dramas this year, so here’s a quick recap, ranked in order of my favorites:

1. Quartet (カルテット)

Quartet’s depiction of human life is simply outstanding. The story follows a group of amateur musicians, each hiding their own untold life story. Every character possesses some personality flaw, just like their quartet name, “Doughnuts.” I especially love the opening scene where Issey Takahashi discusses fried chicken (karaage) and lemon wedges.

“Can you wash karaage?“

2. Doctor-X: Surgeon Michiko Daimon, Season 5

Even though I also binged the earlier seasons this year. Toshiyuki Nishida and Kenichi Endo are two major highlights—their acting is masterfully nuanced and hilarious.

What I learned most from the show was Daimon’s professional attitude, especially her trademark line:

私、失敗しないので (I never fail.)

For patients, a failed surgery can easily be fatal. That is why for every single operation, she takes every conceivable variable into account. Only then can she deliver that overwhelmingly confident line, “I never fail,” every time.

3. Only Japanese People Want to Live in Kichijoji? (吉祥寺だけが住みたい街ですか？)

The protagonists are two twin sisters living in Kichijoji who frequently advise their clients against moving to Kichijoji. After all, it consistently ranks as the number one neighborhood where Japanese people want to live, making it quite tough to find a truly suitable apartment.

Each episode is only 30 minutes long, making it perfect for watching during a lunch break.

Every episode depicts a different story—authentic portraits of ordinary working people who, hoping to change their lives, decide to start with a fresh apartment. The show doesn’t harshly push you to strive endlessly; instead, it frames a new home as an outlet for venting your emotions.

Work is already hard enough, so don’t be too hard on yourself. Take a day off, enjoy a light drink, take a warm bath, and face tomorrow refreshed. It really makes you appreciate the importance of living. While working, never forget that you are a living human being, not a slave; you have flesh and blood, and you hurt when bruised. There’s no reason to let work crush you.

“A company is such an insignificant thing. There’s no reason to hurt yourself over something so small.” (会社なんて小さいもんだよそんなもんで傷つく必要なんてない)

4. Your Home is My Business! (家売るオンナ)

Having recently finished moving into a new place, watching this drama made me deeply realize just how immense an impact a home has on an individual and a family. The story centers on a real estate agent and how she sells houses.

She manages to sell a house in every single episode, and her catchphrase is: “There isn’t a house I can’t sell.” Being able to approach your work with that level of self-assurance is the definition of true professionalism.

As for her secret, she puts it simply:

“I am not responsible for just a house, but for the client’s entire life.”

Of course, things are a whole different story here in Taiwan.

5. Overprotected Kahoko (過保護のカホコ)

The title is actually quite clever: “overprotected” (kahogo) and Kahoko (the protagonist’s name) sound very similar in Japanese.

Just as the title suggests, the plot revolves around a sheltered mama’s girl who relies completely on her parents for every detail of daily life and rarely faces setbacks. Eventually, through romantic love, she gradually learns to become independent.

This drama offers food for thought from multiple perspectives: parents who use the “it’s for your own good” banner for emotional manipulation, refusing to let their kids forge their own paths; children raised in a greenhouse wondering whether this is truly how they want to live their lives; and finally, nurtured by love, Kahoko stepping out of her bubble to practice independence.

Mitsuki Takahata does an incredible job playing this innocent and adorable character.

6. It’s All About the Looks (人は見た目が100パーセント)

As the title implies, this drama follows three women who don’t know how to dress or groom themselves, failing to be popular like other girls, feeling invisible at work, and lacking confidence at group dating mixers.

Determined to become more popular, they start practicing makeup, styling, and social skills. The show gradually explores the process of these girls transforming from awkward women with zero fashion sense into polished, radiant figures.

Not being a woman myself, it’s hard to fully grasp the sheer effort poured into self-care and styling just to be liked. But watching this drama, it’s clear how much hard work actually goes into it.

(Nitpick: The female lead is clearly gorgeous to begin with.)

7. The Public Enemy (民衆の敵)

Although this drama deals with politics, the plot feels remarkably fresh and idealistic compared to typical political series. The female lead runs for city council simply because she wants to earn more money, eventually ending up as mayor. For viewers accustomed to heavy political dramas, this might not satisfy their palate, but as a lighter, casual watch, it’s quite good—at least nobody is covered in blood or doing drugs.

Still, it highlights some of the gaps between reality and idealism—such as the dilemma politicians often face where advancing the welfare of some may require compromising the interests of others.

Or instances where one focuses purely on the immediate problem without realizing the far larger underlying causes.

“Focus solely on making the people around you happy.”

This is a line the female lead loves to say. While it might sound short-sighted, I think it’s actually a wonderful heuristic for making decisions. Bringing happiness to everyone is practically impossible, so you might as well start by making those around you happy. Sounds hypocritical, right? In today’s cynical world, saving one person without saving everyone else gets you labeled a hypocrite.

(This drama also features Issey Takahashi, my absolute favorite.)

Movies

Most of the movies I watched this year were Japanese films. Here are a few that left a strong impression:

1. To Each His Own (ちょっと今から仕事やめてくる / I’m Breaking Up With My Exploitative Company)

The trailer for this movie caught my eye immediately. The protagonist is a corporate salesman living an ordinary working-class life, surviving each day under crushing stress, verbal abuse, and constant apologies.

What do people really work for?

Forced to swallow pride and endure unreasonable treatment just to make a living, the male lead eventually loses any sense of purpose and attempts suicide by stepping onto train tracks. While this rigid corporate mindset might not be as extreme in Taiwan, in Japan people typically stay with a single company until retirement without ever changing jobs. Granted, since the bubble economy burst, the lifetime employment system has been gradually unraveling. But as we all know, Taiwan still has plenty of room for improvement—take the news about the overwork death at PX Mart, for instance.

It reminded me of a scene from Only Japanese People Want to Live in Kichijoji?:

A company is such an insignificant thing. There’s no reason to hurt yourself over something so small.

If your job leaves you with zero passion, perhaps it’s time to pause and reflect on the true meaning of work.

2. Let Me Eat Your Pancreas (君の膵臓を食べたい)

I previously shared this novel and its story in my weekly newsletter, and the film adaptation was recently released.

“They say if a part of your body is unwell, eating the corresponding organ of an animal will heal it.”

The plot might seem a bit cliché on paper: a lively and cheerful female lead diagnosed with a terminal illness, an accidental encounter with a quiet, introverted boy, a burgeoning bond, and a few tear-jerking tropes. Yet the title remains striking—most people would be intrigued by such an unusual name.

Even so, watching the movie was still genuinely touching, especially thanks to the female lead’s spirited personality, which is utterly captivating. On a side note, watching the film also made me realize that library book classification is a remarkably deep and intricate discipline.

The Miracles of the Namiya General Store (ナミヤ雑貨店の奇蹟)

Keigo Higashino is one of my favorite authors. Beyond pure detective mysteries, his works span diverse themes—such as the Galileo series featuring physicist Manabu Yukawa—as well as short story collections (like the Smile series) that reflect Japanese social phenomena to varying degrees.

As a heartwarming, healing novel, The Miracles of the Namiya General Store first caught my eye with its cover. Reading it confirmed my deep admiration for Higashino’s structural mastery and the pure satisfaction of seeing multiple narrative threads weave together seamlessly at the end. While certain plotlines may lean idealistic, Higashino isn’t the type to merely preach empty platitudes like “chase your dreams”; there are plenty of stories here about people holding onto ideals only to be defeated by reality.

The naming also holds clever wordplay: the owner Grandfather Namiya (ナミヤ) is an anagram of nayami (悩み, troubles/worries). That’s a delightful touch that will bring a knowing smile to Japanese language learners.

To quote the final lines:

Because your map is a blank slate, you can draw whatever you wish. Thank you for leaving me with such a wonderful challenge at the very end.

白紙なのだから、どんな地図だって描けます。全てがあなた次第なのです。最後に素晴らしい難問をいただけたこと、感謝申し上げます。

Conclusion

So much happened in 2017. Had I not deliberately organized it like this today, I probably wouldn’t have realized it all. Looking at these numbers gives me a profound sense of gratitude that I bothered to keep records in the first place. Going forward, I’ll likely continue using this format to reflect on my year-end reviews.

There are still many things I hope to achieve in 2018. If I had to sum it up in one sentence, it would probably be: I want to be a useful person.

If you enjoy my writing, feel free to follow me via the links below:

Categories

Pages

Side Projects