Hi, my name is Tomomi.

I finished the migration of this website and cancelled the Squarespace plan. It’s a big deal to me, since this is a site I’ve had since I was a college kid. After the beloved Wordpress era, there was a practical Squarespace era, and now I’m on Astro, editing markdown and writing little scripts with the help of Claude Code.

I figure it’s not particularly interesting news to anyone else, as 95% of the changes are under the hood, but it was a nice surprise to get a lot of positive reactions on LinkedIn.

Filled out the project page on the Build.ripplet.org site, too, so now I feel complete.

Another nice, quiet week. I revisited Donella Meadow’s Thinking in Systems and was very pleased that I understand the concepts much better than the first time I read it, prior to studying ontological coaching and Gestalt psychology.

My brain seems busy, as my recent daydreaming looks like mapping Gestalt and system thinking concepts to novels and TV shows.

Like applying Kurt Lewin’s equation B = f(P, E)—behavior is a function of the person and environment—to The Other Bennet Sister. This starts as the story of Pride and Prejudice through the eyes of Mary Bennet, Elizabeth’s “boring” sister. In the second half of the book, Mary leaves the clutches of her overbearing mother and their small community. She exists this Environment and moves into her aunt’s loving household and the cosmopolitan environment of London i.e. a new Environment, which shapes new Behavior, which eventually leads to a new sense of self and finding happiness.

Or thinking about Robert Harris’s historical fiction, Pompeii, through the lens of feedback loops—specifically, the delays in feedback loops, both natural and manmade, and how information flow throughput is impacted by social hierarchy and greed. Which goes for the Netflix docuseries Trust me: The False Prophet about an FLDS polygamist sect, too.

Open vs closed systems, compounding feedack loops, and information flows, everywhere I look…

Conversation topics with peers and friends:

• Different moments in a professional arc to invest in structured learning
• What kind of work do we want to be doing in our 40s vs 50s vs 60s
• Seeking impact vs contact
• Increasing awareness of what’s happening at different levels of system (self / interpersonal / group / system)
• What are the characteristics of entrepreneurs that just go for it
• Key leadership moments in a project arc and the general lack of feedback loops we have in place to recognize them as such

This week had: a successful project delivery, two enriching workshops (one as a participant, the other as host), one dog, one cat, two potential new coaching clients, an excellent deep dive on the overlap between Gestalt and ontology, a new restaurant find in the neigborhood, plenty of interesting reading, and Josh Groban in concert.

It was a wonderful show, and I hope he tours in Europe more often in the future. He welcomed Monroe as a surprise guest, so we can say we’ve seen the 17 (!) year old singer who’ll represent France in Eurovision this year :P They sang Hymne à l’amour, a beautiful nod to Celine Dion and Paris-here’s someone’s phone recording.

Forgot to mention, last week I migrated this Weeknotes blog from Squarespace to a static site generator. Added a little Weather widget and ISBN-lookup tool for richer book information, too. It’s working well, and in fact, I find myself tweaking the code over writing, which is a familiar dilemma. Haven’t decided what I want to do with that yet…

This week I had a string of long, 1-1 conversations with peers in professional transition - people who’ve made quite drastic changes to their working environment, sometimes their living environment, too, after stewing in it for years. Is there something in the air? I feel a lot of optimistic, exploratory energy from them, a sense of reveling in the open sea ahead.

Most of them have asked about AI, in a kind of obligatory way, like they feel they should ask just to make sure they’re not missing out. This is a conversation I’m actually interested in having, but it is not the moment. Their true interest is in savoring their newfound sense of options and their journey of identity transformation.

Reflecting on that pattern, I’m noting to myself to lean into what Fernando Flores calls “conversations of possibility”.

Here are lines of inquiry that would be supportive:

• What’s become possible for you lately that wasn’t before?
• Where are you noticing something new?
• Sounds like you care about that a lot - where does that come from for you?
• Where does that go, do you think?
• Is that new, or has it been there for a while?
• What’s it like, to say that out loud (to me)?

Now that I’m tinkering and publishing on a near-daily basis on my Build site, Weeknotes has tumbled down the list of things I pay attention to — the new container is custom-built for how I want to think, and therefore it’s way more fun there.

As tempting as it is, I’ve decided it’s not a good idea to fully migrate ripplet.org from Squarespace to Astro. The technical workload is more than I want to be investing, and more importantly, I’d be tempted to re-design everything. Let’s not go there.

But good news, I learned it’s possible to switch over small pieces of it. I could re-build just the Weeknotes blog with the same styles and URL structure, and be free to extend it with dynamic elements and structured templates. This would be great —a smaller scope to work with, and future-forward in the sense that it would breathe new life into the weekly publishing habit.

Quickly, on Week 12 — it turned into a conversation-heavy week, I’m counting eight of them on my Gcal, two in-person and six online. By conversation, I mean conversations that were not meetings but a lot of exploring, debriefing, practicing etc. Some of them were 2-3 hours long. So that’s where the week went, actually…! It was enriching, and I spent the times in-between in silence, recovering :D

Went for a last-minute trip to London to join my UK-based Gestalt peers for some fun weekend plans.

Got my Build project site in pretty good shape. It’s fun to update too, so I think I’ll actually be able to sustain its use. Once I make a bit more progress with some key projects, I will send out a Postcard.

We finally had some sun in Paris, enough that I took an anti-histamine pill to combat the pollen. The whole city felt like it was in good spirits. I’d become a bit too immersed in coding, though. I felt its affect in my sleep, eyesight, short term memory and the way people reacted to how I talked about my experiments and ideas. I had the good sense to call a coach friend for a session—their genuine concern for my wellbeing broke through my jittery stupor, and I put Claude Code aside for three days, to help me start recalibrating. It’s been weird.

I got back to books, too. I figured the easiest way to break the streak would be to pick up a soft, pleasing novel. Yasushi Kitagawa’s “ The Lucky Ride ” did the trick. I started journaling again, leafed through some of my zines and finished Pierre Bayard’s “ How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read ”. I even went for a bike ride for the first time since autumn (taking the Velib around town doesn’t count) and the last piece to bring back will be to get back in the rock climbing gym. I’ll do that tomorrow/Monday.

This week, I spent all my time building apps with Claude Code. It’s a very strange feeling, to have my software engineering years in my 20s merge with my product design experience, and to have access to all of that (and more) through a “coding assistant”. On the seventh day, I started running a fever—a literal sign that my brain was being fried. Caught up in fever dreams, and trying to wrap my mind around the implications of what I was learning. I’ve started putting out feelers to find “safer” containers for the exploration, so there are other people involved, there are projects, and it’s more integrated in my professional activities.

I went for two coffee+walks along the Canal, attended Dancing Voice/Singing Body workshops (online) from Meredith Monk/The House Foundation for the Arts, and spent an afternoon sauntering through a forest. But I read no books and didn’t journal at all this week, so that’s where my Monday shall start.

I went to see the exhibition L’empire du sommeil at Musée Marmottan Monet, which had some nice pieces but felt like an unserious attempt at tackling a rich theme like sleep. It didn’t explore dreams, day dreams or napping at all. And there were a few too many pieces that were “man/god looking at nude, sleeping female“ to which I had a heightened awareness of, as our visit was the same day that former prince Andrew was arrested. Still, a museum visit and light dinner afterwards is such a wonderful way to spend a weekday evening and I’m determined to repeat it soon.

A big week for Emotions at Work, as we kickoff a multi-month engagement with a new client. I was reminded yet again how energizing it is to spend time with open-hearted clients that seek partnership to make a dent in their aspirations.

I finally took a proper plunge into vibe coding, and got from point A - hey here’s an idea to point B - hey here’s the URL of my app, try it out. Yes, I got as far as hooking up a Github repo, Vercel, and Supabase so that I can deploy web apps with a database backend. It’s been a lot of fun and I’m liking the learning curve. I think I can become much better, very quickly, and then see how useful that is…!

I worked on two apps:

• An learning app that helps increase fluency with a Gestalt framework that I’ve been having retention issues with—I generated exercises, and designed a chatbot that acts as a teacher. It’s laser focused on helping you learn the material, and doesn’t try to analyze you or “support” you, which is an issue with a generic LLM experience. My goal is to make a couple of single-purpose learning apps under the umbrella of Gestalter for me and my peers. This is a very good start!
• A whiteboard tool for a workshop activity that we often run at Emotions at Work, for which I have not been able to find a sufficient workaround for in Miro or Figma. There are still technical challenges to be overcome but I’m more and more optimistic that I can build something we can use ourselves. Once I’m there, we’ll explore the possibility of releasing it as a paid service. This is a much more ambitious app than a Claude API wrapper, and I’m mindblown at how far I got just sitting on my couch on the weekend.

I had three outings, so not in complete cave mode, but close to it. Mostly I did what was needed for work, and then just read book after book.

• Kaho Nashiki’s “ The Witch of the West is Dead ”. It’s a short novel of a troubled young girl who goes to live with her grandmother in the forest for a while, where she learns the ways of a witch, gaining fluency in plants and animals and attunement to self. It was a delightful, easy read, with lots of lovely phrases. There was a bonus short story after the novel—a few scenes of the main character in a period that was not covered in the book, splitting perspectives with another character who was only mentioned in passing in the main story. So you get a sense of what happened in between chapters of the main story, delivered just in that moment when you’re mourning a bit that the story has concluded. An unexpected cherry on top that I would dearly love to see more authors do!
• I skimmed Takashi Saito’s non-fiction book “ The place where only book readers can arrive ”. Saito is a well-known educator and prolific author. But I was put off by the cold and condescending tone and ended up skipping over large swaths of it.
• I read Daisuke Kishida’s “ Textbook on business for the ‘new’ wealthy “ for work.
• Shigeru Mizuki’s “ Mizuki-san’s Happiness Theory “ was a wonderful read. The first half was his thesis on happiness, and the second half was a series of autobiographical essays about his life and career. I know Mizuki as a hugely successful and beloved manga artist, and was sucked into reading his accounts on his experience as a conscripted foot soldier in WW2 and decades of struggle as a starving artist.
• Keisuke Hada’s novel “ Phantom ” was a strange one. The set-up is promising—the main character, a 32yo salaried worker obsessed with FIRE and the stock market, has to decide what to do about her boyfriend, who looks down her priorities, gets pulled into a cult that rejects the monetary economy. The story attempts to question what happiness lies beyond the pursuit of financial independence but the cult storyline felt forced and distracting. I was disappointed.
• Looking for something casual and entertaining, I read Hisato Watanabe’s “ I did an in-depth report on a historic ballet company on the verge of going under—and it was intense. ” based on his experience as a hired gun producing YouTube videos for said ballet company. The ballet company takes an incredible risk ‘letting‘ this producer set the editorial direction, as he follows his nose on what’s interesting, and gets into the personal lives of the dancers and handles taboo topics like how much money they make. Their courage and open-mindedness to try something new, because clearly the existing ways are not working, is humbling. There is no promise of success, and indeed, they get tons of criticism. But against the odds, they start selling out shows and building a new audience that had never been interested in ballet before. Incredible.