May - Finishing the Mandatory Military Service

My 21months of journey in the military service deserves its own blog post. Lots of things to explain for foreigners. I'll publish that post later... But yeah, I'm now officially a Korean man who accomplished their mandatory military service. Yippee

July - First part-time job

After completing the military service on May, I decided to apply to some kind of internship or part time job. I was returning to the Univ from winter semester so I wanted to use this free time in meaningful way. My thought was that if it worked out, great, if not, then not. I could still use the remaining time studying Math and Physics which I forgot a lot while having 3 years of absence. I could also practice driving.

After seeking for an opportunity, I was able to work part-time job at Naver Cloud, one of the biggest AI company in Korea. I worked at the office from 9 to 6, 4 days a week. I expected doing some miscellaneous works like organizing prints, but they let me do actual software engineering. Honestly I was fine even if I had to do unprofessional work because my goal wasn't just building a career but to experience a real work place. So I was really grateful to work as a SWE there.

...I should have taken more pictures.

From Naver Cloud, I developed and maintained an internal tool to test and demonstrate their LLMs. I really didn't expected my first work would be with python and AI because AI is one of the areas I have least interest in. Though I still enjoyed the work there, it was fun to build a super extensible and easy-to-maintain system. By their policy, I was only able to work for 3 months, so I tried my best to make it maintainable even after I leave there.

What I've built there was just an experimental, internal demonstration app, but because it was a demo app, I could learn a lot about different LLM toolings and techs like basic embedding, RAG, MCP, and context management.

Yeah, I know. Basic stuffs and technically not that interesting. It's unfortunate that I had to leave there before doing more interesting stuffs with them. But it was still a cool experience to work on a big tech. I just worked as a part-time developer and not even an intern, though they were very nice to me.

September - Working at startup..?

While still working for Naver Cloud, one of my roommates from the air-force introduced me to a startup. After an initial coffee chat, I worked there as an intern in parallel with Naver Cloud. Unfortunately that didn't went well mostly due to my future unavailability with my University schedule.

October - First Job Offer from Tangled

After finishing the part time job in Naver Cloud, I was going to finally focus on study before I'm back to the Univ. I haven't studied math for more than 4 years, so I forgot many things.

I posted my unemployment status in BlueSky.

The post says I was going to contribute to open-source, but of course I was thinking maths and physics instead

And next day I got a DM from Tangled.

..?

???

ME???

I received a job offer from Tangled and have happily accepted it.

tangled.org was THE project I've been mostly contributing to lately. I've submitted few PRs (one of them was issue/PR search) submitted some proposals, and said few good words about Tangled in BlueSky, but this was completely unexpected. It was so unbelievable that even my mom (ex-SWE) asked me if it's new kind of scam, 7 times.

I've always dreamed about being a paid open-source developer someday, but this is way too early than what I expected. My rough plan was:

1. get a degree in Mechanical Engineering & maybe Electrical Engineering too

2. simultaneously continue my hobby to build a career as SWE

3. with all those knowledge, apply to some job

4. after I have enough career, maybe find a job related to FOSS

And I achieved step 4 before even completing the step 1.

For real, company like Tangled was my dream job, at least as far as I imagine right now.

• I like Tangled's goals

• I like Tangled's tech stack

• I personally use Tangled as well

• I have the ability to make Tangled better

• I have more ideas to make Tangled better

It's hard to believe that this is my first job. It is my first proper job, first time working oversea company and first time working fully remotely.

I was afraid if my University situation bother them, but they understood my situation and let me do both in parallel.

Thankfully they're bold enough to hire a student who doesn't even have a degree yet hehe.
No I'm just kidding—they're not stupid.
They clearly have a good eye for choosing people and I'm doing my best to prove they made the right choice.

November - FOSS for All Talk

bluesky post

I got a chance to have a session in FOSSforAll conference in Korea, so I briefly explained about the atproto.

Wrapping up

So this was all of my last year. Wow, I really didn't expect the second half year to go this busy. Crazy...

I'll be mostly focusing on Tangled in 2026.

Discuss on BlueSky

• FOSSforAll

• tangled.org