From Tangerang to Tamkang: Ink, Traditional Characters, and Relocation
Reflections on moving between archipelagos, studying 繁體字 in Tamsui, and carrying Tarakanita CC5+ values across seas.
There is a specific feeling that happens when you sit in an empty room in a foreign city for the first time. The ambient frequency of the street is different. The air smells of wet asphalt and sea salt rather than equatorial rain and clove. You open your laptop, pull the latest commit from your repository, and realize that code is the only geography that didn't shift.
I. Two Suitcases and a Laptop
Transitioning from high school in Tangerang to university studies in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Tamkang University (淡江大學) in Taiwan has been less about changing countries and more about changing the lens through which I see problems.
In high school, we collaborated in noisy groups, built short films ('Roda di Balik Gerobak'), debated the ethics of automation, and hacked on hardware with whatever micro-controllers we could find. Here in Tamsui, the pace slows down just enough to force you to think about foundations.
II. The Geometry of 繁體字
Studying Traditional Chinese characters (繁體字) has fundamentally reshaped how I write software. Consider a character like 鬱 (melancholy/dense) or 臺 (stage/platform). Every radical inside the character carries historical intent, balance, and weight.
If you make the left radical too wide, the entire balance collapses. You cannot rush it. In modern frontend engineering, we are taught to throw utilities together at breakneck speed. Traditional calligraphy demands that you respect the negative space.
“Negative space is not empty space; it is the tension that allows the form to speak.”
III. The Six Principles (CC5+)
My school years were grounded in the Tarakanita CC5+ framework: Compassion, Celebration, Community, Conviction, Creativity, and Competence.
People often assume engineering is detached from morality. But when you build an emergency mesh network like PENJAGA-MOBILE, designed to work when cellular towers collapse, competence without compassion is useless. You are building tools for human survival, not for benchmark bragging rights.
IV. What Anchors a Builder
I keep making things I don't completely understand yet. Whether it is an MoE router, a cascaded dual-loop PID algorithm, or learning to slap an intricate 16th-note groove on a four-string bass, the joy has never been in being an expert.
The joy is in the friction of the unknown — in that quiet, late-night moment when the terminal prints clean output, the string rings true, and the machine comes alive.