Rick Cogley

We are grateful for everyone's help in getting eSolia to this point - we are already 26! 🥳

It's taking time, but we're still deep in our ISO 27001 certification journey. The last quarter has been focused on developing our internal app suite and making sure our software dev process follows ISO guidelines properly. The reason for the apps is we're also working on pivoting our business model—moving from a largely time & materials based contract model, toward a mix that includes payment for defined services.

We have soft launched Periodic, a DNS and email security configuration drift monitor, Pulse, a project management tool focused on step by step work to comply with control sets, Courier, a secure sharing tool, Chocho, a listening comprehension training app for ESL learners, helping them learn English accents, and finally Hanawa, a headless CMS. That's a lot of apps! This is not to mention a complete re-write of the main website esolia.co.jp in the last couple of months, and our new "Tech IT Easy" blog at blog.esolia.pro.

On the tech side, I'm leveraging AI tools like Claude Code and MCP servers, the Svelte/SvelteKit ecosystem, the full Cloudflare stack, plus ElevenLabs and Microsoft Azure Speech voice recognition — they are really cool, almost scary systems. AI is here to stay, and it's important to know how to use it.

I've been completely prolific over the last few months, just buzzing with ideas and work. I guess that fog I felt six months ago is gone for the forseeable future. So far I’ve avoided colds this winter.

I just celebrated my "kanreki" (60th birthday) with a big family gathering! It's a significant milestone in Japanese culture, and it was wonderful to have everyone together. I even got to wear the red kanreki getup - the "akai chanchanko".

My wife and I are now focused on documenting everything — app passwords, bank accounts, family history, photos, memories — since we're both around 60 and want to make sure it's all preserved and there, should anything happen.

Reading: Cloudflare documentation and ISO standards (work never stops!)
Listening: Cloudflare and Svelte podcasts
Watching: Mayor of Kingstown

On the personal project side, I'm building out pub-cogley, my personal publishing stack. It's a SvelteKit + Cloudflare Workers system for owning my content across protocols like ATProto, ActivityPub, Webmentions and Nostr.