Welcome Miyagawa-san

The post below has been contributed to Mena's Corner by Ben Trott -- Six Apart's co-founder and CTO (and my husband). For lack of his own corner, he'd like to take some time to write about a new addition to our staff and his growing engineering team.

Although the announcement is a bit belated, I'm very happy to say that Tatsuhiko Miyagawa at Six Apart as our VP of Partner Engineering. Miyagawa-san was previously the Chief Technical Architect at Livedoor in Japan.

I've known Tatsuhiko for a while now, as he and I had corresponded fairly regularly about Movable Type, our respective CPAN modules, TrackBack, etc. We had met in person once, as well, at a Six Apart users gathering in Tokyo.

But when we were in Japan last October, we had dinner with Tatsuhiko, after our Japanese team told us that they'd been talking with him about joining Six Apart. I was, of course, already familiar with his work on CPAN and in the Japanese blogging community. On a whole, the Japanese blogging community is incredible about adopting technologies: TrackBack, for example, is very popular in Japan, and TypeKey (as a protocol) is also fairly prevalent. And Tatsuhiko had quite a bit to do with the adoption of both of these technologies, both from his work on CPAN and in the community in general. He's contributed everything from database replication plugins to mobile client libraries to a feed aggregation service.

He also likes to take photos of food and beer!

In short, he's just the kind of person that we like to hire.

Tatsuhiko adds to what is already an incredibly strong engineering team in Six Apart KK. For example, Daiji Hirata, who's been with us from the beginning (and before, at Neoteny), should be largely credited with making Movable Type as popular as it is in Japan. He and the rest of the team at Neoteny localized Movable Type into Japanese; he's also the author of a book on Movable Type, as well as running some important services for Japanese bloggers.

Part of what really motivated me to write this post, though, is just the past couple of weeks, when Tatsuhiko and Daiji visited from the Six Apart KK office, and Jean-Yves Stervinou and Yann Kerhervé visited from the Europe office.

I couldn't help but contrast this against the last time that we'd had engineers out from Japan and Europe to the office. We'd decided to have them out in May of 2004. Specifically, from about May 5 to May 15, scheduled specifically to be after the Movable Type 3.0 release.

Well, the schedule for MT3 slipped a couple of days, and so they spent the week and a half in our office in San Mateo, coerced into working to get Movable Type 3.0 out the door. It was a good bonding experience, but not that useful for the intended purpose of getting our respective teams in sync.

What really became clear to me during their trip this time is how much the company--and in particular, our engineering team--has grown. We've still got a ton of projects we're working on currently--and that's a good thing--but, for example, there are now lots of people for the visiting engineers to meet with. They have a purpose here, and there's enough knowledge at the company that even if one of our server engineers were to be forced to be on jury duty--just, say, as a hypothetical--we'd still have people available to get work done. And that's a very good feeling.

So, we're very happy to welcome Tatsuhiko, as well as the rest of the engineering team that we've added in the past year and a half. And just as another note, we're always looking for more engineers.