Adam Onishi

Tried to write every day so far this year and here's January's round up.

Days completed: 25/31
Average word count per day: 677
Total words written: 16,929
7 journal posts, 15 fiction, 2 work based, 1 review

Heading into February with a writing plan for a new project...

Trying out Linear with it's Cursor integration for a personal project and it feels icky. No way I'm letting my PM loose with this 🙃

Mid-Level Frontend Engineer - Yoto We’re looking for a Mid-Level Frontend Engineer to join our team to build and optimise high-performing e-commerce experiences that help new families discover, understand, and confidently become par...

Which is to say, my team are hiring at Yoto!

We're looking for a new Frontend Engineer to join my team to help work across the website and headless Shopify store. It's an exciting time to join with a fantastic bunch of people to work with

careers.yotoplay.com/jobs/7050729...

Posts a job role on LinkedIn, immediately get inundated with recruiter messages and invite spam 🤦

Continuing to update writeevery.day a little each day. Now I don't have to manually update prompts every day, I can write ahead and they'll release each day

Still updating writeevery.day on day 3. Used the prompt myself today.

Will continue adding features over time like automatically updating each day so I don't have to manually publish each prompt, and maybe allow people to suggest a prompt.

For now, the code is on Github github.com/onishiweb/wr...

January 1st is always a time when we feel we want to start something new, do something with intent for the year ahead, and sometimes that intent fades. Especially when it’s not published.

I spent a lot of time not publishing things in 2025, hoping for a different start to 2026...

Plenty of stuff to add, it's probably not 100% accessible/performant yet and there's no features for day 2 either, but will continue to play around with it over the coming days/weeks.

This is very thrown-together so far but I've made a fun little side project to keep me going this year: writeevery.day

This is the saddest day of my professional life. Today is not only the final recording of the latest series of The Infinite Monkey Cage, it is my last ever Monkey Cage. I never thought that I would have to leave the show. I always imagined going on until | dropped dead under the studio lights due to a brain aneurysm caused by my final attempt to understand notions of quantum gravity or the shock of being told about fly maggot infestations in the sacks of macaque monkeys. I resigned in September, after sixteen years of dedication to the show, A show that I named and helped develop over all those years. Unfortunately, my opinions outside the BBC have been considered problematic for sometime, whether it has been voicing support for the trans community, criticism of Donald Trump, numerous other outlandish opinions, including once gently criticising Stephen Fry. These things were considered to conflict with being a freelance BBC science presenter

In a recent meeting where BBC Studio executives again voiced problems with me, I realised my choices. Obedience and being quieter to remain making Monkey Cage, or 'Resign and have the freedom to speak out against what I believe are injustices'. • I chose the latter. It broke my heart. I love this show and I love the audience, and it is because of the audience in particular, that this decision was so difficult to make. I kept thinking about all the extremist voices promoting hate and division. They are being given so many platforms, while voices that represent kindness, open mindedness, empathy seem to be scarcer and scarcer. I felt I couldn't pamper myself with the luxury of silence. One of my many privileges is that I am able to resign and I can speak out even if it is to the detriment of my career.

I have thought a lot about my heroes, Sinead O Connor, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and so many more. I think of Sinead's words, "the job of an artist is to be themselves at any cost". James Baldwin said prejudice was really just a word for cowardice. Audre Lorde, viewing her life, wrote that her only regrets were her silences. I think of my father as I resign, he brought me up to believe in fairness , justice and kindness. Though my heart is broken, it is also full of fire. I apologise to our incredible listeners for my departure, your love of the show means a great deal. I am so sorry to let you down. I hope that you can understand my reasoning. I have to accept that I am not what the current BBC expects of their freelance presenters.

Despite this I should add that I have always worked far more than my contracted hours to try and ensure the show was always the best it could be, as well as making myself accessible and responsive to the audience wherever and whenever I met them. Every night, we have recorded, I have been filled with determination to make the best show possible. This was not "just a job" I hope that with my departure I can be a better ally to the LGBTQ community, to the neurodivergent community, to activists fighting against those who aim to brutalise society, to those currently in prison on hunger strike, and to all those who fight for a more inclusive world. From many conversations, I know there are many Monkey Cage listeners who support these communities and activists too. The strawberry is dead. Long live the strawberry. B

Very sad that I felt I had no choice but to resign from The Infinite Monkey Cage - a victory for the transphobes and other bigots - I did it because so much of the media has chosen to believe the kind and empathetic people are a fiction - they are real and so often unrepresented.

Writing Jira tickets on the train with train wifi 🫠 #perfmatters

The speakers for FFConf in a grid with topics: distributed power, inclusivity by design, design systems and web components, privacy and ethics, the good internet, ai brain drain, code and culture and finally: journey to coder.

Less than a month away - every #FFConf ticket comes with a free bucket of pure unadulterated inspiration, but caution: side effects of buzzing head have been known.

(Plus, prices switch to late bird in a few weeks - spread the word!)

2025.ffconf.org

Sausage casserole in a cast iron pot

Sausage casserole now topped with potato slices ready for the oven

Casserole update, it turned into a hotpot

I mean yeh I get that but £10 today for regular stewing beef was a shocker. Average shop has definitely gone up but that took me by surprise today

Noice! I’m thinking of topping mine with some sliced potatoes and making it a hotpot 🤔 Apple crumble for dessert too

Productive day, made bread, bought Lego, prepped a big slow cooker sausage casserole for lunch tomorrow.

Can anyone tell me what the heck happened to the price of beef!?

5 films to get to know me:

Clerks
Human Traffic
Matrix
The Dark Knight
Ace Ventura

I spend 3 days at a company offsite and now I have a bloody conference talk floating around in my head. Why!? 😅 I thought I got out of that game already

I've been quiet here on the work front, and never made an announcement

🥁

But this year I joined Yoto!

It's an audio player for children that aims to entertain without the need for screens.

Why does an audio player need a developer advocate? You'll find out soon 😄

"I'm just playing devil's advocate" ugh, just fucking listen and stop trying to justify bullshit 😩

I have a feeling the fairly substantial codebase I'm starting to contribute to might be a bit too old for that so soon...

Back to working with Sass again after many years away, feels comforting 🫶

Help us challenge the Supreme Court’s judgment on trans rights | Good Law Project

🏳️‍⚧️ NEW 🏳️‍⚧️

We believe the Supreme Court – which disgracefully refused to hear from trans people before its decision last week – has placed the UK in breach of its obligations under the Human Rights Act.

So we’re readying a challenge – join us:
goodlaw.social/xpme

Stand up for trans rights 🏳️‍⚧️

Join me and @GoodLawProject and help us fight the Supreme Court’s harmful decision:https://goodlawproject.org/s/c41bb8

In 1890, the X and Y chromosomes were discovered. It was found that the men who were tested had 46 chromosomes, including an X and a Y, while women who were tested also had 46 chromosomes, including 2 X chromosomes. So obviously the conclusion was that the Y chromosome defined masculinity. A reasonable conclusion. Fast forward 50 years... and it was found that some men had 47 chromosomes, including 2 X's and a Y, while some women had 45, including only one X. Still no problem with the "Y chromosome defines masculinity" idea. Then... it was found that fully 1 in 300 men weren't 46,XY. Some women were. Oops. After DNA was discovered in the 50s, it was found that the SrY gene, usually found on the Y chromosome, sometimes was missing. And sometimes had been translocated to another chromosome, hence 46,XX men and 46,XY women. So SrY defined masculinity. Then.. it was found out that some men didn’t have an SrY chromosome, not anywhere. Some women did. Other genes were involved. Worse, other factors, such as Androgen Insensitivity made 46,XY people female, and Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia masculinised 46,XX people. Then in the 70s, other syndromes, such as 5alpha-reductase-2 deficiency were identified, which caused babies to look like one sex at birth, then the other at puberty. Worse, in some places 1 in 50 infants had this natural sex change, it was not rare there.

Science 1974 Dec 27; 186 (4170): 1213-5 In an isolated village of the southwestern Dominican Republic, 2% of the live births were in the 1970's, guevedoces....These children appeared to be girls at birth, but at puberty these 'girls' sprout muscles, testes, and a penis. For the rest of their lives they are men in nearly all respects. In the 90s, it was found that hormonal hiccups in the womb caused some parts of the body to develop as one sex, othersbas the other, regardless of genetics. Male–to–female transsexuals have female neuron numbers in a limbic nucleus. Kruiver et al J Clin Endocrinol Metab (2000) 85:2034–2041 The present findings of somatostatin neuronal sex differences in the BSTc and its sex reversal in the transsexual brain clearly support the paradigm that in transsexuals sexual differentiation of the brain and genitals may go into opposite directions Sometimes a boy is born looking like a girl, sometimes a girl is born looking like a boy, regardless of chromosomes. We don't teach the Theory of General Relativity in grade school, Newtonian physics or at most Special Relativity (far simpler) is enough. Similary, "XX is female, XY is male" is good enough unless you do medicine or biology in college. It's only really relevant when talking about Trans or Intersex people, just as Relativistic effects only become relevant in the domain of the very big, very small, or very very fast, close to 186,000 miles a second. People do *not* need psychiatric help when they think that things get heavier, more massive, as they go faster... while lengths contract. People do *not* need help when they think their sex is something different from their genetics. Intersex people exist. Trans people exist. They are unusual, so trying to apply the usual approximations is as silly as trying to apply Newtonian physics to things moving close to or at light speed. Legislating such things is as insane as legally ruling that Pi=3... as has been done in the past.

www.facebook.com/share/1DSnNM...

If you find yourself arguing with people who want to talk about XX and XY, penises and vaginas.. They won't read this but refer them to this anyway.

This statement about the transphobic Supreme Court ruling by the UK's Crab Museum (yes a museum about crabs) is better than 99% of the statements I've seen on the topic

www.crabmuseum.org/visit

🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀

A partially complete Lego Mercedes F1 car

So far completed stage 4/12 and we have the front and rear axels and rear wing!

The manual for a Lego Mercedes F1 car

Finally time to start on the birthday present before Xmas comes…

Stuck on a train because of a tree on the track with no information and a bunch of drunks shouting over all the announcements. How’s your Saturday night 🤦🏻‍♂️😭

Time to go back to coding and focusing on what I enjoy about work instead of trying to force myself to grow into something different when it's not working.

Not planning on changing company just yet, which I guess is a fortunate situation to be in... [2/2]