Recap 2025

Time sure flies and in just a few more hours we will leave 2025 behind. I want to take a moment to take a step back and review my year 2025.

Job Hunting and Joining WeWork Japan

The year for me kicked off with me joining WeWork Japan in February, leaving a job and company I had worked for for almost 5 years. During that time I was able to lead projects, teach Junior engineers and made personal connections that would outlast our tenure at that company.

Joining WeWork Japan was also the first time in 10 years to go back to work with an international team and English as the environments primary language. WeWork Japan, even though technically a Japanese entity, is a franchise of an global company after all, so everything felt way more "international". I was a bit hesitant at first since the first 6 months were on Contract-basis, but it became clear from pretty much the first day that my contract would be converted to Full-time if I desired so and I would stay with the company.

I felt welcome and valued from the moment I joined and this is true to this day. I am super thankful to my team and WeWork Japan and I am looking forward to continuing working with my team.

Founding the Laravel Japan Group, PHP×Tokyo meetups and the road to Laravel Live Japan

The second big change in 2025, incidentally came almost at the same time with me changing jobs, was the establishment of the Laravel Japan Group in late January with a handful people.

It all started with Ryuta Hamasaki and me deciding to start a Discord server to gather people and to our surprise, within just a few days we already had dozens of PHP and Laravel fans gathering.

After forming our core team, we decided to start organizing meetups in Tokyo, with the first being held in March. Some 40-ish people attended, exceeding our expectations. We would organize 3 more meetups throughout the year, about one every 3 months.

On top of that, our plans for an official Laravel conference in Japan really started taking shape after talking to Laravel and finding a great venue for the event. From there we would find and start working with an event agency, a ticketing platform and other partners. Meanwhile we are receiving, reviewing and accepting/rejecting talk submissions, and step-by-step the conference program is taking shape. Behind the scenes we are talking to potential sponsors and other parties to be involved, but I am sure the conference will be a great success for both the Japanese PHP/Laravel community, as well as Laravel gaining another stage in the form of a conference in East Asia/Japan.

I was also made one of the community leaders of Laravel for Japan.

Personal Growth

This year again, I tried to expand my horizon and dabbled in new territories/played around with a host of new stacks and technologies.

While I did some bootcamps and Udemy online courses related to Kubernetes, leadership and a few other topics, the more interesting things I tried out or started using were Flutter (mostly because it is being used at work and I got curious), Tauri (and in extension Rust) as an alternative to Electron, and a few other things. While I potentially can't even remember all the things I have been working on besides Offskip (see my previous post about that), there is one rather unlikely project I just started recently: Archy, a browser written in Rust, Electron (Typescript/Vue), wrapping the Chromium engine. And while I had no idea at first what I got myself into, it is a lot of fun and there are tons of learning points. I probably will write about that project in a separate blogpost soon.

I also continued mentoring a friend getting into Web Development and very much enjoyed seeing the progress they made.

Looking forward

I look forward to continue and expand on what I have started during this year and before that, but to name a few things: I do plan on releasing Offskip in 2026, I will keep working on Archy, keep mentoring and teaching and of course, keep organizing meetups and Laravel Live Japan and explore new opportunities as well. I hope I will be able to attend many other conferences as well and meet many more people (again).

Otherwise I have started studying advanced Japanese again, so I definitely want to keep that going. On the more personal side, I hope I get to meet people more often next year.

I usually don't like to set strict goals for the next year, so I will leave it a that.

I wish everyone a Happy New Year!