With clients in Honolulu, Tokyo, and around the world, Sakuzaku is the Pacific’s leader in custom web solutions for mid- to large-size businesses. Founded last year, we specialize in design of web applications with a focus on improving user-experience to transparently promote client goals, through elegant, effective, and eminently usable websites. We make usable websites and make websites usable.

As young entrepreneurs who have grown up with the technologies of the Web, our age and experience uniquely positions us to offer insight and hands-on experience in ways that others can’t.

Founded in 2005 by Cody Robbins, Sakuzaku was initially a single-person web development firm based in upstate New York and offering contract development work to a small number of core clients. Since then, its client base has grown exponentially. In late 2005, Mr Robbins moved the business to Honolulu to take advantage of the growth potential latent in Hawaii’s central location between Silicon Valley and Japan.

In 2007, Mr McVickar joined the company to bring our clients much-needed expertise in usability engineering and user-centered design. Messrs Robbins and McVickar attended high school together and have been working together since 2000. In total, they have almost 20 years experience working with developing software that runs on the Web.

Cody Robbins
Principal and Founder

Cody Robbins is responsible for overseeing the technical details of all projects and ensuring the quality of client deliverables. He has over 10 years experience developing, deploying, and supporting software, and working with all aspects of modern Web technologies. He has lead the production of multi-million dollar mission-critical software systems for SNS’s and e-commerce solutions for clients in Ruby on Rails, PHP, and MySQL. A consummate pragmatist–perfectionist, he can view difficult problems from a multi-faceted perspective that balances conceptual simplicity and technological requirements with pragmatic constraints and business goals, all with an unerring attention to detail.

Mr Robbins is multilingual in Spanish, Japanese, and German. He is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a Bachelor of Science degree cum laude in computer science. He is pursuing a Master of Science in computational linguistics at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

Matthew McVickar
Co-Principal and Lead Usability Designer

Matthew McVickar is a usability engineer par excellence. He manages the production of end-to-end client websites and provides consulting expertise in the area of usability, interface design, and user-centered development, and is responsible for all human-factors review and analysis projects. His background includes more than 6 years developing websites and a wide range of experience developing usable interfaces for information display and end-user interaction on the Web, for deployed applications across multiple industries. Mr McVickar is fluent in Japanese. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Japanese Literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Michael Yaworski
Senior Software Engineer

Mr Yaworski is a senior Ruby on Rails developer with experience in software and Web applications. He combines excellence in documentation, debugging, and requirements analysis with his demonstrated skill as manager of tasks and deadlines for multiple projects and clients. He previously has over 10 years experience programming implementations of turbulence simulation models, adaptive meshing, and massively parallel finite-element algorithms. Mr Yaworski was pursuing a Ph.D. in computational fluid dynamics before leaving to focus solely on full-time software development. He has a Master of Science in aeronautical engineering, and Bachelor of Science in physics, both from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Brendan Kemp
Software Engineer

Mr Kemp is a talented developer and systems administrator, whose experience writing software for the Web ranges from online real estate systems to database-driven content management systems. Before turning his sights to the Internet, Mr Kemp developed embedded controller interfaces for robotics applications in C++, as well as Cocoa desktop apps for OS X. He is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts of Amherst with a Bachelor of Science in computer systems engineering.