About
YokotaCorp Inc. is the software company of Chad Fowler. It exists to build the layer beneath the products people notice — protocols, identity, and the infrastructure that decides who can prove what, and to whom.
Chad Fowler
Chad is a technologist, an author, and a working musician. He has spent his career on the engineering side of that same question — how software outlives the people and companies that wrote it — as an engineering leader, a long-time contributor to the Ruby and Rails communities, and more recently in writing about how software gets built when machines write most of it.
His books include The Passionate Programmer, Programming Ruby, and Rails Recipes. He writes and speaks about regenerative and generative software, local-first systems, context portability and user-owned data, and programmable organizations.
More at chadfowler.com.
Current work
freeq
IRC rebuilt with identity: a shared environment where people, agents and services participate as verifiable peers, with cryptographic identity built on AT Protocol.
freeq.at →source on GitHub →
The Phoenix Architecture
A book in progress on regenerative software — why the durable asset is the system rather than the code, and what replaces version control when implementations are regenerated instead of maintained.
Read the essays →Field notes
Short technical posts on identity, agent coordination and protocol design, published as they happen.
freeq.at/blog →Music
Chad plays saxophone and records regularly. Recent releases include Memphis Mandala (2026, with Art Edmaiston, Ra Kalam Bob Moses, Damon Smith and Clifford "Pee Wee" Jackson, recorded live at Crosstown Arts in Memphis), The Eternal Now is the Heart of a New Tomorrow (2024), Birdsong (2024), and Embracing the Unknown (2024, with Ivo Perelman, Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille).
He also runs Mahakala Music, a label whose catalogue includes William Parker, Matthew Shipp, Eri Yamamoto and Ivo Perelman. Recordings are on Bandcamp.
Elsewhere
- Personal site — chadfowler.com
- Code — github.com/chad
- Bluesky — @chadfowler.com
- Label — mahakalamusic.com
Company details
YokotaCorp Inc. is an independent software company, founded and operated by Chad Fowler. The official website of YokotaCorp Inc. is yokotacorp.co, and its published software is developed openly at github.com/freeq-irc/freeq.
General and business enquiries: hello@yokotacorp.co