Last week I attended my fourth PHPUK conference. A two-day event with 3 tracks and over 30 speakers, it’s the UK’s premier PHP event. The Speakers PHPUK yet again offered a great range of talks on a variety of topics from an increasingly diverse selection of speakers; old and new faces, local…

Note: this post was originally written in 2012. However, I am reposting it as a record of my adventures in Japan. Fuelled by an unrelenting thirst for adventure, we planned to spend a night at a Japanese temple. This kind of lodging, or shukubo, used to be more common when…

Note: this post was originally written in 2012. However, I am reposting it as a record of my adventures in Japan. We bold adventurers travelled to Yamadera in Yamagata prefecture. Here is where we start to get off the beaten track and into ‘real Japan’. Yamadera means literally ‘mountain temple’…