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Q&A

• last updated July 6, 2026 •

Hobbies

How do you know Japanese?

The TL;DR is that I am a hopeless weeb consistently put in a nontrivial amount of effort. This is pretty much how you develop any skill, actually.

What things do you do in Japanese?

• Consume anime/light novels/manga.
• My main Blue Archive account is a Japan server account.
• Play spinoff Pokémon games (I still play main series Pokémon games in English). For example, I played Pokémon Pokopia in Japanese.
• Play other games (the most recent one, which I loved, was 魔法少女の魔女裁判).
• Do AtCoder problems.

The statement “I do more things in Japanese than in English” has some truth to it, actually.

What should I do if I want to learn Japanese?

This is a rather broad question, and there will probably be a dedicated page just for this question in the future.

What should I not do if I want to learn Japanese?

Not be consistent. If there’s one thing you take away from these past few answers, it’s to be consistent.

What do you think about the JLPT?

Once you’ve passed the JLPT, you’re 10% of the way through Japanese.

Teaching

Why did you go into teaching?

• There’s this random person named Kevin Atienza that pulled me into all of this.
• Blue Archive.

What are your favorite takeaways from the subjects you teach?

• Wishful thinking is a very valuable programming skill to have.

• Start by finding a solution that works before finding a solution that’s good.

  Poking around with a straightforward $\cal{O}(2^n)$ algorithm is more fruitful than malding for an $\cal{O}(n \log n)$ one.

  In Blue Archive terms, a successful 10pan Lunatic clear will always give more points than a failed 3pan one.

What did you least expect out of teaching?

Having good infrastructure is a very important part of the job (see Section 6 of this Evan Chen post).

Programming

Should I use Typst or $\LaTeX$?

99% of the time, I would say Typst. If you have the time to build tools around Typst, I would highly recommend it.

I’d say that Typst’s strongest point is how low the friction is to doing scripting (see the GitHub example). If that’s what you want, you’re in for a treat.

At this point, $\LaTeX$ feels like more of a “good to know if I need it” tool. It’s not completely out of mind—this site still uses $\LaTeX$, for example.

Misc

Can I say/ask something?

Feel free to! The fastest way is through Discord (_daryll_).

Favorite…

• anime: A Certain Scientific Railgun (とある科学の超電磁砲レールガン)
• Blue Archive character: Hoshino (ホシノ)
• color: yellow
• math symbol: $\cal{O}$ ($\ell$ is a close second)
• programming language: Julia
• Pokémon: Dragonite
• 四字熟語: 一心不乱