My new startup: Kenji Rikitake Professional Engineer's Office

This is an announcement of my new startup business.

I've started my own business, as a Japanese government-licensed Professional Engineer of Information Technology (in Japanese it's called Gijyutsushi), since April 21, 2014. It's called Kenji Rikitake Professional Engineer's Office (KRPEO).

KRPEO provides the consulting and engineering services on information technology in general, including but not limited to: information and network security, the design, deployment, implementation and performance tuning of Erlang/OTP, FreeBSD, and Riak. KRPEO will provide all services in both Japanese and English.

I had been looking for a full-time job since October 2013, and I made a conclusion that the job market near Osaka was mostly for energy-consuming legacy programming tasks due to the fact that most of the high-end software engineering companies were only located in Tokyo. Most of the employers in Japan do not accept remote teleworking due to the cultural and legal reasons either. So I had to lean out from the traditional corporate culture of Japan, for a more sustainable business model, making myself, my family, and my customers happy at the same time. I understand this is a hard challenge, but I will definitely take it.

My involvement in the open-source developer and network operator communities in Japan and the world will remain the same and unchanged.

The English announcement site for KRPEO is at http://www.k2r.org/krpeo/. The Japanese site URL is: http://www.k2r.org/gijyutsushi/.

Update 28-APR-2014: add the URL of the English site, correct the URL of the Japanese site.

Erlang Factory SF Bay 2014: list of some notable talks

(Photo: a shot during my talk by Yoshihiro Tanaka, used by permission)

(Disclaimer: there were too many talks I wanted to listen to, but I couldn't.)

Here's the list of talks I thought intriguing for Erlang Factory SF Bay 2014 (links are to the slides or videos):

• Mike Williams on What Programming is Really About
• Brian Troutwine on Monitoring Real-Time Bidding at AdRoll
• Kostis Sagonas on Erlang VM and Term Storage scalability
• Fred Hebert on Planning for Overload
• Natalia Chechina on Scaling Distributed Erlang at a supercomputing environment
• Garrett Smith on Erlang and CZMQ, and the choice of using Erlang Port for CZMQ
• Dave Thomas and Jose Valim dropped an atomic bomb to the audience on how to catalyze the change to get more newcomer and other community's attention towards Erlang/Elixir ecosystem
• Rick Reed on Scaling at WhatsApp

I also wanted to listen to the following talks, and found the slides intriguing:

• Jay Nelson on eliminating single process bottlenecks with ETS concurrency patterns
• Lukas Larsson on Memory Management battle stories
• Louis-Philippe Gauthier on Performance Optimization 101

I will post my impressions for the above talks in later articles. I would like to note some personal impressions for the audiences this year:

• Erlang is no longer an exotic language or system. The audiences want the real solutions and hints.
• Elixir is gaining popularity, and will surely contribute to reduce resentment against BEAM (Erlang VM) and the ecosystem.
• The implementation talks were getting more detailed and hard core, and the questions were also more specific.

Video quality

Thanks to the hard-working video and audio recording and editing team, this year's video quality is very high in overall. While the live streaming was not possible due to the prohibitive cost, some videos were made available within six hours from the end of the talk. I think this was impressive and a practical solution to make a trade-off between the turn-around time for the availability and the quality of video of the talks.

[To be continued in another article]