About Me

My name's Kai, I'm a self-taught software engineer from Tokyo. I started my career at a startup doing manual mobile app testing, and after a few years I landed a position at Amazon working on Alexa as an automation QA engineer. I was employed there until 2024, when I decided to quit and transition into full-time software development.

I never attended university, and prefer self-paced study. During my year off I wanted to address some of the gaps of a traditional CS education through online courses: I particularly enjoyed Stanford's Algorithms Specialization and Nand2Tetris for Computer Architecture. I am passionate about improving my craft, and believe that quality in software can be best influenced by those building it, which is why I wanted to transition from QA.

I've lived my entire life in Japan, but I grew up fully bilingual thanks to my parents. My dad is from the US, and when I was little we had a rule that we would only speak English at home (I say "we" had a rule; they had a rule, I was a child and just thought it was normal). I breezed through 6 years of "English classes" at school, but it slightly bothered me that I had never learned another language, so when Covid struck I took the opportunity to learn Spanish. I spent a lot of time looking into the science of language learning, and ended up finding the method of "comprehensible input" the most effective.

I am an ultimate frisbee player, and have spent the majority of my weekends practicing or at tournaments. I spent a large part of my 20s attempting to make the Japanese national team, and finally made it one time for the World Beach Ultimate Championships in 2023. Currently I'm playing with my mixed team, Kuru.

Aside from ultimate, I enjoy getting stuck into hobbies in general; I like chess, video games, some squash or bouldering for cross-training purposes, and recently have gotten hooked on this amazing D&D campaign by VLDL.