Founder
Software Development
React
Javascript
Gatsby
Sanity CMS
Python
Full Stack
ETL
Japan
Management
Live Music Production
Concerts
Event Organisation
Ticketing
Marketing
Sales
Celebrity
Tokyo Indie was a popular club night that I founded in Tokyo in 2009. The bi-monthly night I organised attracted large crowds and hosted major artists like My Bloody Valentine, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, CSS, Metronomy, Scissor Sisters, members of The Stone Roses, The Mystery Jets and many more. To support the event I ran a dual language media site that featured the latest goings on in the Tokyo music, art and culture scenes. I also developed the website for the blog, recently performing a full-stack rebuild using Gatsby, React and Sanity CMS.
Whilst the site was originally built with Wordpress, I recently decided to rebuild it from scratch using the React framework; Gatsby, as part of a headless CMS setup with Sanity CMS. This was a full stack development job as well as an export, transfer, load (ETL) exercise. For the ETL I wrote a custom python script for porting the old site content whilst following a test driven development methodology using python's unittest feature.
I was directly involved in the promotion of our media site and our events. On the media side, in 2009 dual language sites were few and far between and being dual language was a unique selling point that I used to draw in international talent. From there we had a base of contact to persuade artists to appear at our physical events. Once the artists agreed to appear we utilised a well oiled online marketing strategy which involved social media, mailing lists, guestlists and our own website to pull in large crowds event after event.
The production and planning of each event itself fell to me and my team. This meant hiring and staffing the venue, artist logistics, handling technical and hospitality requirements and sorting all finance for the events.