Hiroko Nishimura's Blog

Want to try out Amazon Lightsail but nervous about the technical aspects? I’m going to help you learn about Amazon Lightsail and teach you how to create a WordPress website even if you have zero AWS experience! All you need is an AWS account (and a domain name).

In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to:

Set up a WordPress website using a “click-to-launch” pre-packaged applicationLog into your WordPress websiteHow to connect to your server with SSHCreate a Lightsail static IP addre...

In January 2026, my family made our way across the pond to stay in Edogawa, Tokyo, Japan for 3 weeks with 2 toddlers in tow. I knew our experiences with Japan with very active toddlers will be extremely different from the “stereotypical” Japan vacation review/report, so I wanted to write up a quick blog post with our experiences, and places we visited.

Mostly, a reference to other toddler parents who may be contemplating taking a trip to Tokyo as well!

We have 2 toddlers, and stayed in an...

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The post Stacking 1% QOL Improvements for Better Sleep appeared first on Hiroko Nishimura.

I bought a lot of things in 2025. Not proud of it, but there are a few things I got that have had outsized impacts on my quality of life. In my 2025 best buys, I hope you’ll find something that will improve your QOL!

There are affiliate links to some products, and if you end up purchasing from my link, I may earn a small commission!

Daily Life 2025 Best BuysTopologie Phone Sacoche

The Topologie Phone Sacoche is a super utilitarian cross-body bag that looks super tiny, but ca...

Every year, I write out goals and aspirations for the upcoming year, and every year, I fail them or completely forget about them. Because of this, I hadn’t even bothered to make goals for the past few years. This year, I’m going to try something different, and create more mindful goals for (hopefully) higher success rates.

If you chase too many rabbits, you get none, I decided to frame my goals in different aspects of my life, and tried to choose one overarching goal for each. The categories ...

This year was a strange and eventful one! This was the first year I feel like I came out of my pregnancy/postpartum hibernation that I was in for about 4 years straight, starting from 2021 when we began trying to have a baby. (I reflected on my hibernation in a Substack post in March: The world keeps spinning, and I keep hiding.)

When I created a monthly timeline of things I did in 2025 in preparation for this post, my January through April was completely blank, except that my 2nd child start...

Spending long periods of time with people exhausts me, but being alone (especially in a new situation) also scares me. I’m an introvert with sprinkles of extroversion (where I crave connection, but get exhausted by connection at the same time). This year, despite the social anxiety, I decided to challenge myself and attend AWS re:Invent.

Since leaving my corporate job in 2019, the only people I regularly talk to in real life are basically my husband and my kids (both toddlers). Outside of tha...

Every person I confided in that this was my first ever in-person tech talk was astounded that this could possibly be my first tech talk, when I’ve been a teeny tiny “tech influencer” for most of a decade, and an AWS Hero for half a decade. But yes, yes, it’s true. I had never given an in-person tech talk!

So this October, I finally took the leap to give my first ever in-person tech talk at AWS DMV Community Day in AWS HQ2 in Virginia.

Why no tech talk until now?

One of the biggest r...

It’s only mid-November, but I’m beginning to get ready for AWS re:Invent in 2 weeks! Starting with packing lists and things to think about. I hope this post might help you begin thinking about what to pack and things to do to prepare! (There are some Amazon Affiliate links to products that I use and love in this post!)

I know everyone thinks about the “normal” stuff like clothing and charging blocks, so here are some stuff I’ve recently started bringing on all of my trips.

Packing List...

This August, I attended my first Global AWS Heroes Summit in Seattle, just in time to enjoy the tail end of some gorgeous weather. I’m not really here to talk about the discussions and presentations, because the whole post will just be a mass of [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] like a file released from the NSA.

Rather, I want to talk about the energy, the people, the sense of being part of something big.

AWS Heroes Program

The AWS Heroes Program is a bit shrouded in mystery. There are...