People and Blogs

I’ve had the honor of being featured in the weekly newsletter People and Blogs! You can read my full interview here, and I’ve also re-published it below for posterity.

Let’s start from the basics: Can you introduce yourself?

Hi, I’m Emma! I’m half-Japanese and half-Australian, and was born and raised in Sydney before moving to Tokyo in 2022.

Growing up, I was a huge PC gamer. Spending so much time on my computer is what led me down the path to studying computer science at university, and then getting a job as a software engineer. I work remotely for an Australian software company and do a 4-day work week, which gives me more time to enjoy hobbies like my blog.

Although I grew up as a super introverted person who liked to stay indoors, I tried out hiking for the first time when I moved to Japan and was immediately hooked. My current goal is to complete the hyakumeizan, a list of Japan’s 100 most famous mountains. After 3 years, I’m just over halfway at 55/100. I expect the remaining half to take a lot longer though, since a lot of the remaining mountains are far away and/or require hiking longer distances to complete.

Outside of hiking I also like to read and on the rare occassion, play airsoft. I’m trying to learn Mandarin so that I can speak to my partner’s grandparents, but I’ll admit that that’s pretty slow-going at the moment.

What’s the story behind your blog?

Early on in my career, I didn’t have much confidence in myself as a programmer. When I first started learning how to code at university, it felt like everyone around me already knew what they were doing, and I was playing catch-up. It took a couple of years for things to start to click, and as I settled into full-time work I knew I wanted to become a “better” programmer but at the same time I didn’t really know where to start. I’d often heard the advice that you should start a blog to share what you learn, since being able to explain a topic to someone else requires you to know it really well. And so that’s how I started blogging!

In 2020, I commited to writing a post every week which I managed to end up sticking with for the entire year. When I moved to Japan in 2022, programming outside of work took a backseat as I tried to find new hobbies and make friends, and so my blog fell by the wayside a bit as well. It was around this time that I got super into hiking.

At first I didn’t feel like hiking was worth blogging about, but by 2024 I started to write up a post after each new mountain that I climbed, like when I climbed Mt Fuji. Although there’s a lot of information on hiking in Japanese, there’s not as much out there for English-speakers, so the more I wrote about hiking, the more I felt like I had something that was worth sharing.

Although I started emgoto.com off as a programming blog, it’s been a really fun realization for me there’s really no constraints on what I should write about. I own the blog, so I make the rules! I expect that one day I might start hiking less, or run out of mountains to blog about, in which case I’m sure I’ll be able to find something new to start blogging about too.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I write all of my posts in a text editor called Obsidian. I try not to be too much of a perfectionist about things. I think that even if my writing isn’t perfect, it being out there on the internet for someone to read is better than it lingering in my drafts forever. I don’t have a specific writing process - generally I just start with a rough outline and add in random unfinished sentences or thoughts and then come back to it later to make it a little bit more coherent.

I’m also a big fan of the digital garden approach to blogging, and so I don’t necessarily see publishing a post as the end of it. Probably 90% of the views I get on a post will come months after it’s released as it starts to show up in Google searches. So I tend to keep an eye on my analytics and if I see the views are starting to trickle in on an older post, I take that as an opportunity to go back and see if there’s anything I can improve about it.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

To get out of a rut, I like going to a fancy cafe to help get me in the zone. I used to live near a Sarutahiko Coffee, which is a bit of a fancy coffee chain that I would recommend if you’re ever visiting Japan. There’s something motivating about having other people around you working on their laptops.

Other times an idea might come to me while I’m zoning out on a train ride, so I’ll just word-vomit out my thoughts into a text file on my phone. The time I spend hiking is also another great source of inspiration. I find being disconnected from your phone for a full day gives your mind a lot of time to wander and just think which is generally rare for me when the internet is a quick phone swipe away.

A question for the techie readers: Can you run us through your tech stack?

I’m currently using Astro, after making the switch from Gatsby late last year. The build times are definitely an improvement, and the overall dev experience feels much nicer as well. I use React for the frontend, since that’s what I use at my day job.

All my blog posts are organized as MDX posts (i.e. fancy Markdown that lets you insert components into your posts). I was previously using Markdown with my Gatsby blog as well, and so that made it really easy to port all of my content over.

You’re all probably familiar with frontmatter, which lets you add metadata to your posts. At a minimum, each of my Markdown files will have a title, date and tags, but I do like to use this feature quite extensively with my hiking posts. For example, I have a map with all the mountains on my hyakumeizan page so inside of the frontmatter for my hiking posts I also note down the latitude and longitude, elevation and other relevant data for the mountain.

One fancy hack I have is scheduling when my posts are published. After I write a new post, I’ll raise it as a pull request on my site’s Github repo. I then have a Github action that automatically merges the pull request on a certain day of the week. And merging the code triggers a new deploy of my site, so it’s a really handy way of staying consistent with my publishing schedule. I find it’s a lot less stressful than rushing towards a deadline to try and get out a new post every week.

For hosting, I use Netlify. I also use Cloudflare CDN, which caches about half of the requests, and so thankfully I still have a fair bit of leeway on Netlify’s free tier.

Since I cover very different topics on my blog (books, programming, and hiking), I have different designs and layouts for the 3 sections. Part of the fun of running a blog for me is the design aspect of it, so I spend a lot of time procrastinating on the actual writing by tinkering with the blog’s code.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I wouldn’t say I regret it too much, but I did have a full 2-year break on my blog when I first moved to Japan. At the time it was very programming-themed (it’s still the same design you can see today on the programming section of my site) and so although I wanted to blog about Japan, it just felt weird to do that on my programming blog.

I was able to do a redesign to make the different sections of my site clearer, but in hindsight I wish I had continued to blog a bit during that time. I learned how to drive in Japan, actually, so even a post about the driving school experience would have been pretty interesting I think.

I’m definitely glad though that I named the blog after myself, since it did give me that flexibility to keep on writing about whatever I wanted to. As long as I’m the one doing the writing, anything goes! Maybe I would have gone with emmagoto.com instead of shortening it to emgoto.com - at the time I bought the domain I thought having less characters sounded cooler.

Financial question: How much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate revenue?

I pay 17 USD a year for my domain name using NameCheap. This is the only real expense for my blog since the hosting is free.

I don’t generate any revenue. For a while, I did have Carbon ads on my programming posts as they are quite non-intrusive, but it was only bringing me in a couple of dollars a month and I felt I’d rather have no ads in that case, so I removed it.

Finacially the blog has no benefit, but I do feel like it gives me a sense of purpose, and it’s nice knowing that someone out there is (even if it’s just one person) has gotten value from the stuff that I’ve written. And even if no one reads some of my more niche hiking posts, I like being able to go back and read them for myself too.

Time for some recommendations: Any blog you think is worth checking out? And who do you think I should interview next?

If you’re interested in reading more about hiking in Japan, I recommend ridgelineimages.com which is run by a fellow Aussie. And if you’re looking to get super niche, One Hundred Mountains can provide a bit of an interesting deep-dive into the history of Japanese hiking as well.

I also love discovering new blog designs - some of my recent favourites have been Nic Chan, iamrobin, Anthony Fu and elle’s homepage.

Final question: Is there anything you want to share with us?

Come hike in Japan! If you’re not sure where to start, I have a round-up post with some of my favourite hikes in Japan as well as some recommendations for day hikes from Tokyo. And of course feel free to reach out to me on Bluesky or Instagram if you have any questions.

I’d also like to plug Hardcover which is a book tracking app that is turning out to be a pretty good replacement for Goodreads. They have an API you can use to query on your books (which is I’m sure music to any dev’s ears) and they’re planning on going open-source too!