Eon's ago, when I was only a couple years into my journey as a web developer my family and I were in Tokyo visiting my wife's old university friends. One of them is Yozo Shimada, her senior at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. I seemed to impress him with a romanticized version of what it was like being a web developer and work for digital agency's as he later went on to work for a digital agency in Shibuya called Monkey Production Inc. (or Monkey Pro) and has been there ever since. 

Yozo and I have kept in touch over the years. His world has been one of digital design, print and photography with a little bit of front end web development thrown in. Mine has been one of backend heavy web development (I originally started development of what became PRISM around the time that I met Yozo). We were always looking for ways to collaborate together but it didn't really make business sense. Japanese design is a lot different than western design, time zone differences, different business cultures and language barriers all came into play.

Recently Yozo reached out to me with a problem. As their agency has grown and their clients needs have grown, Monkey Pro was looking to partner with a custom app developer that was able to take on whatever challenges they could throw at them. Well it seemed like the opportunity presented itself and Levis Tech was brought into the fold to help out!

Monkey Pro needed to developed a more sophisticated backend for https://mymobox.bridgestone.co.jp/. While complicated technical problems are our specialty this project presented a few extra challenges, but it was nothing PRISM and the Levis Tech team couldn't handle.

Because of technical and budget restraints requirements from the client, we were unable to full host the solution and redo the entire site on PRISM. Instead the team built a custom dashboard on PRISM so Monkey Pro is able to manage the data that is being pulled to the store locations and product selectors on the website. REST requests are coming from the otherwise static site designed by Monkey Not to PRISM to generate the dynamic content. Not only did this meet the clients requirement, but it left the design expertise to the experts at Monkey Pro to do what they do best.

It's been a fun project. It's interesting to look back at how connections from the other side of the world have led to close friendships and become business associates. Also the Levis Tech team thrives on new challenges and while this project was technically in line with what we do the circumstances and requirements behind it added a certain novelty to it.

Stay tuned for more. We're in continuous talks with Monkey Pro about future collaboration and looking at a wide array of opportunities for PRISM in the Japanese market!