From Buenos Aires to the pro tables
·5 min read
Friends reading Akagi and Saki, a forum thread and a set of tiles from Chinatown: how riichi mahjong took me from Buenos Aires to Tenhou, to Osaka and to the Japan Professional Mahjong Association.
Writing
Notes from Osaka, in three languages.
What I’ve learned doing customer success and go-to-market in Japan, building with AI tools, switching careers, learning languages, and playing mahjong for a living.
Customer success in Japan: a practical guide for enterprise accounts
·6 min read
How to run customer success with Japanese enterprises, from the weekly teirei to incident reports and renewals timed to the April fiscal year. Written by Vercel’s first Japanese-speaking CSM.
How large Japanese companies actually adopt AI coding tools
·6 min read
The order it really happens in, from the security check sheet to the first internal hackathon, seen from the vendor side. With checklists for buyers and vendors.
What professional mahjong taught me about decisions
·6 min read
Riichi or damaten, push or fold, and the hand right after a big loss: the calls a riichi mahjong pro makes every game, and how I use them in renewals and deals.
Why I still write code in a customer-facing job
·6 min read
I lead customer success and run go-to-market for Japan at a developer platform, and I still reproduce bugs, read logs and build demos myself. Why it matters, when to hand off to engineering, and how CSMs can get more technical.
From translator to frontend engineer: how I actually switched careers in Japan
·6 min read
I studied translation, worked in customer support and marketing, and started writing code at work because my team needed tools. How the switch to frontend engineering really happened, what translation training gives an engineer, and what I’d tell career switchers in Japan.
How I fit pro mahjong, music and the gym around a remote job
·5 min read
I work remotely for a company in San Francisco, play professional mahjong, interpret M.League into English at night, play piano, sing and lift. How the calendar and the energy actually hold up.
Moving to Japan to work in tech: what I’d tell myself in 2016
·6 min read
I moved to Osaka in 2016 and started on part-time jobs and a mahjong parlor floor. The Japanese, job-hunting and community advice I wish I’d had back then.
Web design for Japanese users: what changes besides the language
·6 min read
Long pages, a company profile, a legal notice, LINE next to the contact form, polite error messages and more line height. What I change when a site is for Japanese users.
Learning English, Japanese and Chinese: what worked and what I’d skip
·6 min read
I taught myself English as a kid, started Japanese from a website at eleven and later studied translation. The methods that held up, the ones I’d skip, and specific advice for learners of Japanese.
Localization is not translation
·2 min read
What breaks when a site goes Japanese, before anyone reads a word of the copy, and the few lines of code that fix most of it.
Working in English, Japanese and Spanish on one Mac
·6 min read
The macOS input setup, Japanese IME settings and habits that make a three-language workday manageable: switching shortcuts, full-width characters in code, Spanish accents on a US layout and keigo in Slack.
What teaching Japanese taught me about onboarding customers
·5 min read
Before I onboarded enterprise customers or coached mahjong players, I taught Japanese at the University of Buenos Aires. Lesson design, checking understanding and the first win still shape how I run both.
Working from Osaka for a San Francisco company: time zones, async and evenings
·6 min read
Japan is 16 or 17 hours ahead of San Francisco, and the real overlap is a couple of hours of the Osaka morning. How I decide what goes async, how I write handoffs, and how I keep my evenings.
How I use Claude Code every day, and how I check its work
·5 min read
How I frame tasks, write the repo’s rules down in AGENTS.md, and verify everything with builds, smoke tests, screenshots and the diff. The way I run this site and my homelab with an agent.
Explaining Japanese enterprise deals to a US headquarters
·6 min read
Ringi, April budgets, bank transfers, security checklists and SIers: why deals and renewals in Japan move the way they do, and how to turn that into a forecast HQ can plan around.