🌱 Hi, I'm Emma! Here's some facts about me. You can also check out my now page to see what I've been up to lately.

• 🇦🇺 I'm half-Japanese and half-Australian, and was born and raised in Sydney. I can't say I appreciated Australia's nature enough while I was there, but I did love its coffee.
• 💻 I work remotely as a front-end engineer at a software company called Atlassian. I've been here since I graduated university, which was over 6 years ago now. Having a work-life balance is super important to me, so I only work 4 days a week.
• 🗼 In 2022 I moved to Tokyo. I've always loved the food, how there's so much to do and its amazing public transport system. It's been even more fun than I was expecting, so I plan on sticking around.
• ⛰️ Looking for a new hobby, I picked up hiking in Japan. My current goal is to complete the hyakumeizan, a list of Japan's 100 most famous mountains.
• 🎮 Before hiking, I used to play a lot of video games—some of the older Assassin's Creeds, Anno 1800, Horizon Zero Dawn, and L4D2, to name a few. I still have a gaming PC, although I don't play very much anymore!
• 📚 My other hobbies include reading, airsoft, and of course, this blog.
• 🐕 When I lived in Australia, I owned a dog named Aka who I loved very much (RIP to a very good boi). I’d love to get another dog one day.
• 💪 I also have an on-and-off gym habit. My barbell squat is pretty bad (35kg), but I’m quite proud of my 14kg (or 28kg total) dumbbell bench press.
• 🏃‍♀️ I always tell myself I should run more, especially to help improve my hiking fitness, but it's a habit I've not really been able to stick to.
• 🇯🇵🇨🇳 I can speak Japanese with my friends and partner at a conversational level, but can't write it and struggle to read it. I also want to learn Mandarin, so I'm trying to work on both at the same time.
• 🎨 I also secretly want to learn how to draw, but there's just so many other things I want to do already...

About this blog

• I started emgoto.com in 2020 as a programming blog. In that first year, I wrote a post every single week, which helped me get over my fear of blogging and not knowing what to write.
• I slowed down a bit in 2021, before completely taking a break from the blog in 2022 and 2023 as I settled into Japan and got really into hiking.
• In 2024, I decided to pivot to writing about hiking, which revitalized my interest in blogging. Writing about the things you enjoy is the most fun!
• I did a site rebuild in 2024. It's now built with Astro, and hosted on Netlify.
• Since I cover very different topics on this 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.