Anyway, as a team we’ve decided to post to our blogs more frequently at last meeting. Our boss has agreed to treat us to nice yummy cakes if we post good entries and get good reputation so that please bookmark or comment on my posts :)

I have one topic in mind to write about but I thought my first post would be the ideal place to introduce myself (and probably no one knows me yet).

So, my name is Kenichiro Kanechika, and my nickname is “Kenichi-Uji” named after Japanese cartoon. The guys here gave me it, and I think it has a certain ring to it :)

I love to travelling overseas and am especially keen on Chinese spoken areas. I’m planning to travel to Taiwan soon!…and Macao as well :) I’m love the friendliness of Chinese people.

The most influential job I have ever experienced was running my own internet shop… I was selling asian lamps back then. Though I had started that business almost without much thought, I was in charge of almost all tasks such as buying items from overseas, negotiating, custom clearance procedure, customer support, order management, stock management, web design, marketing and advertising, etc etc, I learnt to see the overview of business and develop a sense of cost performance as for money and time. The thing is, I didn’t make much money with that business lol

I quit working at a web design company and started working at messaliberty around Jul 2009…by chance(!) Well, I will write about web direction and the internet and PC and so on…

Hope my posts will appeal and interest you, and don’t forget to help me get cake! ;)

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Free Jump by Jinto via Flickr

We are a small team but even so there’s quite a mix of interests, personalities and even food tastes amongst the members of messaliberty.

One reason I joined messaliberty was that I would have an opportunity to learn more things in my chosen fields.  Usability, IA, online marketing and so on. Learning by doing is a big part of working at a start-up.

I asked the team what skills they are looking to learn and master.  Here some of things they mentioned.

Har:

• Ruby on Rails
• *nix/Server administration
• AIR apps development
• English

Ice:

• Ruby on Rails
• Pragger (Plagger for Ruby)
• Advanced Emacs Lisp
• Haskell
• GIMP/Inkscape
• Movie editing
• Self-management
• English

Chapp:

• English
• Finance
• Ruby, RoR, Ruby Shoes
• Marketing
• Business administration
• WordPress & WordPress Plugin
• IA
• Photography
• Server system administration

Hiro:

• Objective C and iPhone apps development
• Python
• Lisp
• Large scale server system administratioin
• AIR apps development
• Advanced business administration
• Advanced Marketing

Finally myself:

• Ruby, RoR, Ruby Shoes
• *nix System Admin
• Fluent Vi usage
• RegEx
• Deeper knowledge of SQL
• Flash/Fireworks
• WordPress Plugin/Theme design
• Japanese
• Advanced Marketing

Some of these things we already know to a certain degree, but we feel we haven’t mastered.  As Michael Lopp said about geeks, a lot of the time we are “wide but not deep” in skills.  I’ll put a reminder on my 30boxes calendar to come back to this in about 6 months to see how we are all doing.  How about you, what skills would you like to add to your repertoire?

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A coder writing some code

Like Ian wrote at this entry The freedom to learn new things, we’re always learning new things. It’s a really important thing working in this industry and can’t improve our products without it. Umm, let me tell you my feeling. It’s really fun, isn’t it!?

Today I’ll tell you one example of what we do. We did a programming event to show everyone how you write some code.

A coder writes some code. Another people watch it and ask some questions to the coder. That’s it. Quite simple. This process can help us to learn how another programmers solve problems or what kind of a productive programing environment does the coder use.

The picture above is our friend’s code. He is a great programmer so we all could learn lots of things during his coding. Thanks!

And one another good point of this event, we can get tons of cookies and chocolates. :P

Sweet audience

If you’re a programmer, join us next time even if you’re not in Japan.

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Gecko 2008-11-10

I met a debugger in nature at our office balcony on November 7th, 2008.
She(or he) was hiding at the balcony and keeping debugging for our office.
From that time, she joined us for a debugger.
She debuged everyday(…. sorry not everyday…, I often forgot to feed her….).
I debbuged everyday.
Debug! Debug!! Debug!!!

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Chapp

Today, chapp who our cook dropped his wallet and room key.
404 Wallet and Key Not Found.

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Japanese manga magazines

Tons of manga magazines go on sale every week in Japan. I can’t figure out how many magazines there are, and which one is the best. But Yassan knows it well cos he subscribes some of major manga magazines. We can find some of it at the office like a picture.

Maybe he’ll recommend his favorites at this blog soon.

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Dried Persimmon from Hiro's home town

Chapp as well as being our main designer, cooks and serves us up lunch and dinner.  But this isn’t about how great a chef he is, I’ll let someone else write that post.  It is about how difficult his task must be because of the differing tastes of each member.  Let me reveal what we don’t eat.

Chapp himself: He isn’t keen on shiitake mushrooms but does eat them.  He doesn’t eat oysters.  Obviously he doesn’t cook what he won’t eat so no kaki-fry for us. :(

Har: He doesn’t eat mushrooms, or black-looking things so shiitake are definitely out.  Not keen on dried fruit like raisins or dried persimmons.

Ice: Doesn’t eat liver or certain types of mustard.  He is “the challenger” when it comes to drinks though.  Habanero soup, real ginger ale, different teas, Final Fantasy Potions, even an scarily named eel drink.

Hiro: Until recently he didn’t eat raw eggs.  I can’t blame him as his whole family got food poisoning (salmonella) from a broken egg.  He himself ended up in hospital. And he doesn’t like the taste of mayonnaise.

Me: I don’t eat fish but I do eat most kinds of seafood.  Luckily for Chapp, I don’t eat dinner at the office, so he is free to serve fish at least once a day.

See how difficult Chapp’s task is?  What about you, what do you not eat?

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To start a new thing, we always need some tools to describe who we are, what we do. The business card is one of these tools. So at the end of the last year, we made new business cards. Our new cards are personalized. Each one of the team could choose a favorite color to dress up the card.

Our new business cards

Chapp and Ian worked hard to make the business cards. Let me say thank you to Chapp and Ian for this great work!

Why are they personalized?

There’s too much content, data on the Internet but no one personalizes it just for you. It makes us hard to get content. That’s why we started hulor. In the same way, we thought business cards should be personalized to make it easy to describe and remember oneself.

When I get many business cards all at once and then go back to the office, I always can’t connect each card with a person. Have you ever had a same kind of concern? Use personalized business cards is one to solve this problem.

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Invader comes to the office

These were ice’s work. His jokes entertain us every time :)

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