I recently did an interview with Zoltan Radnai from Prezi and it’s now available on Prezi’s blog. This grew out of a communication I had with Zoltan after some twitter activity around my talk at the Tokyo PHP Conference.   I believe Prezi has a great product, and the team looks like it’s really pro-active.  If this keeps up they’ll have an amazing product, and I’m eager to see what future releases have in store.  Hmmm, all this Prezi chatter has me wanting to work on a new projects and new talk content….

After receiving an offer from the Japan PHP Users group to speak at their conference this past month I decided it would be a good chance to speak, meet some fellow  engineers in Japan, and to take some time off from work at the same time.   I’m sorry this post is a little late, as I just returned to San Francisco, and didn’t spend too much time on the computer till now.   I had a wonderful time, and met a number of really great people there.   We started with a presentation on APC at the PHP Japan Conference.

The talks where streamed live and you can view part of it below:

My Prezi presentation is now available as well:

This was my first presentation being given with a translator (who was very helpful). Unfortunately I was a little too concerned about time and ended a little too early, but I got to hear a lot of good questions from the audience which was great. (I even got a question via Twitter! Perhaps future Q&A should be done this way!)

Lucas and I then ran off to Hokkaido in search of cool weather and Onsen, we found plenty of both! I found Hokkaido very enjoyable, but I think I’d like to come back for a skiing trip sometime soon. We traveled via overnight train to Hakodate, then Noboribetsu, and Sapporo. Then to Otaru and Sounkyu and back to Tokyo via domestic airlines AirDo. An excellent trip to the northern part of Japan.

Upon return to Japan some conference organizers and others at Rakuten had setup a tour of their building and a brief talk and discussion about scalability. After a marathon run through the stairways at Rakuten we sat down for a quick Prezi presentation and discussion, slides for this are available online:

It was a great opportunity to get to talk with Rakuten and learn more about their company and what a Japanese web company is like and how their challenges may or may not differ from those I see in the valley.

I spent the rest of the trip meeting up with really cool people from Gree, Rakuten, Mixi, Nico Video, and others. Oh and lots of clothes shopping and Anime/Manga! Thanks to everyone who took time to visit with me on the trip and organize the talk, conferences, and social events!