Monday, March 14. 2005
This week I've taken my first trip to Japan to speak at the
Open Source Realize Forum 2005. This event is targeted at educating companies of the benefits of Open Source, and I specifically will be speaking on (you guessed it) using PHP in the enterprise. It's been quite the experience coming to Asia for the first time, and I look forward to the rest of my week here. I am schedule to travel from Tokyo where I am currently to Kobe, and I am told I will also go on a sight-seeing tour as well to Kyoto so you can expect a ton of photos from me when I return. The conference will include speakers from PHP (myself), MySQL (David Axmark), and Zope (Rob Page), so it should be a great series.
Since it's not overly obvious, Open Source Japan is the parent company that runs, among others,
Zend Japan responsible for Japanese sales and localization of products like Zend Studio.
Two days ago I took a day off and did some sightseeing with the President of Zend Japan. We took an amazing full-day tour of historic Kyoto, and Nara and I have some great photos online for those interested. When I get back to the states I'll try to find some time to put descriptions along side things, but even without the descriptions the sights were just stunning. I can't express enough thanks to Yoshi (the President) and the entire Zend Japan staff for making this trip an enjoyable one.