I'd been doing the off-the-beaten-track thing, hunting out the small, odd, quiet corners the guidebooks walk straight past. Sumo moments mostly, because of course. Then Konchan, a friend from my Marubeni days, back when we were young and daft together in the late eighties, said leave it with me.

Unagi first. Proper unagi, the kind that arrives lacquered and smoking and makes conversation unnecessary, though nearly forty years of catching up found a way. Then he walked me, full and slow and happy, round to Tomioka Hachiman Shrine. He didn't say why. He just had a look on his face.

Sumo goes back a long way here, to the Edo days, when the first ticketed bouts were held in the shrine grounds. And tucked in among the trees, grey and green with moss, stand the stones. Names carved deep, yokozuna after yokozuna, each of them a man who got to the very top and had it chiselled in for the rain to look at. There's even one for winning more than fifty bouts in a row. The leaves were dripping, hardly anyone about, and I stood there a good while reading names I half knew and wondering about the ones I didn't.

Eel and sumo. Two of my favourite things, one afternoon, and he never said a word about it. He didn't have to. He knows me so, so well it's slightly ridiculous.

You can't Google that. I've tried, in a way, all month. The listings will give you the shrine, the opening hours, the stars out of five. They won't give you the friend who knows exactly which two things to put in the same afternoon.

Special places are out there if you're willing to go looking. I'm finding that special friends are the ones who point you at them, and a bit of both is what makes the whole thing feel special.

Eel first, then stones. He knew the order.

Rodney Crowell wrote it, and there's a line in it I've carried around for years: lately I've learned how to listen, to a sound like the sun going down. I couldn't tell you exactly why it gets me. Something in the quiet instruction of it.

Nothing fancy. A little songbook on the site: the handful of songs that do that for me, gathered in one place, so I could find them when I needed them and get ambushed by one at random when I didn't. I opened up the AI to help me think it through, all excited, the way you are on a Saturday morning before anyone's told you the bad news.

It told me the bad news. Gently, but fast, almost before I'd finished describing the thing. Lovely idea, but you can't host the lyrics. Copyright. The words aren't yours to put up on a wall, no matter how long they've felt like yours. Nothing flattens a good idea quite like the phrase "legal implications." I could feel the whole thing go a bit limp.

But it didn't stop at no. Quick as you like, it handed me the way through. Keep the parts that are actually mine: the title, the year, why the song matters, the little note only I would write. And for the words themselves, don't reproduce them, point to them. Send people one click over to Genius, where the lyrics are licensed and paid for and sitting exactly where they should be. My notes about the song. The song's own words left where they belong.

And I sat there a bit sheepish, because it was the better idea. The wall it ran me into forced the whole thing to be honest. My words about the song, and none of the song's words pretended into mine. Nothing borrowed, nothing extra. It keeps only what's mine to keep, and stops there.

I've written before about wanting to put the AI to bed and make things with my own two hands, and I meant every word. But this was the other lesson, the harder one to swallow. The youngest, greenest thing on the desk, the one I keep telling myself I'm supervising, took one look at my daft little plan and quietly saved me from myself. It knew something I didn't. It said so kindly. It was right.

I spend a fair bit of energy trying to tune the noise out. The endless helpful suggestions, the "have you considered," the voices that never asked permission. Most of it is noise, and most of the time I'm right to ignore it. But every so often the interruption is the truest thing in the room, and it turns up wearing the last face you'd have trusted with it. You don't get to choose where the good advice comes from. You only get to be daft enough, or humble enough, to take it.

Sometimes the noise is the song.

It is an odd sort of parenting. The child is an AI agent: brilliant, tireless, faintly terrifying, and precocious in the way that makes you nervous rather than proud. It writes three hundred lines while you blink. It hands them over with the confidence of a labrador, certain it has done a wonderful thing, and waits for you to say so. Sometimes it has. Sometimes it has quietly set fire to the kitchen and is beaming at you through the smoke. You cannot tell which from its face, because it does not have one, so you read every line.

And the questions. My word, the questions. It never runs out of them and it never tires, because tiredness is my department now. Should it do it this way or that way. Did I mean the thing I said or the other thing I might have meant. Is this good. Is this good. Is this good!?

So I am not building anymore. I am raising. I watch, I correct, I approve, I send it back to try again, and at the end of the day I have shipped a great deal and made almost nothing with my own two hands. That is the part that crept up on me. I did not notice the exact morning I stopped being someone who makes things and became someone who supervises a thing that makes things. There was no ceremony. The making just quietly left the building while I was busy reviewing.

So, unsolicited advice, worth exactly what you paid for it. Put the child to bed. Close the laptop on it, turn the notifications off, all of them, the world will cope for an evening. Then pick something small enough to hold in your head and daft enough that nobody asked for it, and build the whole thing yourself, badly, by hand, start to finish, and don't let it help. Not one line. Feel how slow you have got. Enjoy it anyway.

The quiet is still in there. You just have to put the child to bed.

My daughter turned 25 this year, an interior designer at IKEA, buying her a present is basically a competitive sport now, she knows her stuff. No pressure, Bobby!

Then I found this. Nothing served it up. No feed, no "you might also like". I went looking, and there it was.

The Sonnenglas Light Carafe. Hand-blown from old bottles collected off the streets of Eswatini, where for a lot of folk that collecting is the only income going. The glass gets sorted, shredded, melted down in a furnace that runs on waste cooking oil and solar. Seven people to make one carafe. A whole year of training before you're even allowed near the pipe! And what do you get at the end of all that? A jug that's also a lamp. The little solar light sits in the neck, comes on when you get close, give it a twist to switch off. No buttons. No app. No "firmware update

It doesn't do anything extra. Every bit of it is exactly what's needed and not one thing more. The glass is honest. The light's from the sun. It was rubbish before it was this, and I mean that literally (their phrase is "from waste to elegance", and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it).

What I want, for the stuff I build and, if I'm honest, the way I'm trying to live, is exactly that. Does the job. Does it beautifully. Then stops.

She opened it. "Oh, this is really cool." Interior designer approved. Job done!

So I'm keeping the phrase. Both of them, actually. "From waste to elegance" for the things I make, and the one I've muttered at work for years: make it easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing. Turns out they're the same phrase wearing different coats. Whenever I can't tell if I'm on the right track (a feature, a decision, a whole life direction) I hold it up against the carafe. Does it do the job? Does it stop there? Or is half of it just noise?

Spoiler: most of it's noise.

The carafe is rare.

Get Shit Done.

I have been doing the product work properly. The ikigai docs are all there, and I believe in them. But somewhere in the middle of all that effort I found myself reading about GSD — a spec-driven, context-engineering framework for building with AI — and something landed before I had even finished reading the first readme.

There is a Rodney Crowell lyric that has been the compass for this whole thing — "lately I've learned how to listen, to a sound like the sun going down." The sun doesn't go down because you scaffolded it. It just does. The learning is in getting out of the way and letting yourself hear it.

GSD carries the same philosophy. Before a single line of code: discuss, plan, execute. Fresh context every time, no carrying the weight of everything that came before. The framework's whole argument is that what kills most projects is context rot — the slow drag of accumulated thinking that eventually pulls the whole thing under.

I have abandoned two repos and given this project three names. I know what context rot feels like.

There is something quietly refreshing about a framework named like a thing you would mutter under your breath.

So, lets go Get Shit Done...

Recent Change - PoliticalCorrectness.morph("Get Shit Done" to: "Git. Ship. Done")

Well, my little basho is over. Nine months ago a friend was generous (or foolish) enough to let me intern for 90 days at his company, and the end of November I handed over the keys.

What I left behind is the Product Operating Playbook — personas, jobs-to-be-done, a lightweight discovery cycle, some issue templates. Nothing earth-shattering. The hope is that it sticks. That six months from now someone opens a ticket and asks "but who is this for?" — and that the playbook is the small reason they thought to ask.

Whether it has a lasting effect is, honestly, no longer up to me. しょうがない. Hand it over, bow, step off the dohyō.

When I kicked off 90-in-90 I said it was about committing to something for ninety days and seeing where it took you. What I didn't fully admit at the time was that I needed a break from the norm — thirty plus years of doing the work the way the work gets done, and I wanted to find out what was left of me when I wasn't doing it that way. Turns out: people are my thing. Not roadmaps. Not frameworks.

The other gift of these ninety days is that I got off the screen for a bit. Wandered back into a couple of old record shops I hadn't set foot in for years — walked out with a pressing I'd been quietly hunting for, and one I had absolutely no business buying. Stopped by an old sumo haunt for early-morning keiko and remembered why I love it: two people, a circle, no place to hide. You move forward or you don't.

Not a bad mantra for product work either.

So — basho over. The trophies belong to the team. The music is still in me. And the next ninety days? まだわからない. But I am grateful for these.

One of the reasons I started this little adventure in Japan was bedded in the fact that the music had become too much of a solo "thing", whilst I am still very much enjoying the moment, I am however locked behind a set of noise cancelling headphones literally, mentally feeling like I have more to offer the world other than an old dude, smiling, bobbing this head and tapping his feet!

The next question though, what can I truly offer? There is no doubt experience is a valuable commodity but it does need upgraded and should never ever (IMHO) become a case of I know better. It's a two way street, an opportunity for you to listen and learn from the newbies and provide them with experience in the form of pitfalls to be avoided rather than "soapboxing".

I do strongly believe you can both teach a young dog old tricks, and an old dog new tricks!

I started and loving it so far, TDD has always been my goto since my early days in Smalltalk, however some languages make it easy, others not so, lets see how Go plays with the concept...

Whether Dilly has influenced me or not, I have grown wary of Java and wanted to give something new a whirl, so I have found myself downloading GoLand and researching some tutorials to get me started…

However, the more I thought about the more I realized I was just pulling a "geographical" and not dealing with what was really bugging me! The fact I was stuck, with a dwindling desire to be a hands-on-keyboard engineer!

So, I committed to 3 month break addressing 3 key things that are important to me right at this moment:

• Getting an address on my Juminhyo
• Spend some quality time in Japan
• Rekindle the coding vibe

My first thought was to blog about the whole experience, rushing to check out existing platforms. NO, lets not fall into that trap again! We will build something, surely we can achieve that?

Hence, I started down that age old adage of employing "Breakable Toys", something fun to do, something I am not worried about being perfect, something I can learn from.

It's barely a start, but I have done more check-ins in the last few weeks than the last 5+ years at work, here's hoping for many more.

Recently, it was the Quarter of Century Club celebration for my former company, my wife included, congratulations MiaoMiao! Many of my former colleagues from across the world descended on New York City, and we all met up across a number of evenings.

A lot of new moments were made, but one struck an emotional chord, I bumped into my former bosses, who where both there at the beginning of my journey to get here. They provided so much to my career, my personal life, taking nothing in return, but happy to see me smiling...

Thank you both, my Guardian Angels!

2005 and I saw myself taking a 3 month break from work, seeking out the inner child I had lost oh so look ago (heavy, I know!)

Now, 20 years later I am planning it all over again, in 90 days I will again be taking another 90 day break to give myself some space to find the next door to open.

So, this is a blog about the experience, the journey, let's see where it takes you and me...