Photo of Rick Cogley

Rick Cogley

Technology Consultant in Japan since 1987

Rick Cogley has been sticking out like a sore thumb in Japan since 1987! OK. CEO & Founder, eSolia. I love family & friends, our handsome Shiba "Maru", coding & scripting, moving. Yokohama ⇆ Tokyo

My Work

CEO & Technology Consultant

eSolia Inc.

Since 1999

Bilingual IT consulting and outsourcing for organizations in Japan

Now Professionally

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.

Now Personally

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.

Some Snapshots

Classic white bridge over a river with a metal fence and a building in the background.
Angular Bridge in Yokohama
Classic white bridge over a river with a metal fence and a building in the background.
Oranges in a box on a bright indoor table.
Sweet King Mikan
Oranges in a box on a bright indoor table.
A white rubber penguin cable cover fit over a cable, sitting on a window sill near a brick wall.
Cable Bite
A white rubber penguin cable cover fit over a cable, sitting on a window sill near a brick wall.
Cozy black and white themed restaurant with a single dining table and chair.
Skewered Meat Shop
Cozy black and white themed restaurant with a single dining table and chair.
A pink box with a black and white dragon design on a wooden table in a calm indoor setting.
Akomeya
A pink box with a black and white dragon design on a wooden table in a calm indoor setting.

Wise Words

"Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

— Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

"As I grow older, I pay less attention to what people say. I just watch what they do."

— Andrew Carnegie

"Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again."

— A.E. Housman, "A Shropshire Lad"