Open Mic Spotlight: Masanori Itoh

MasanoriItohThis post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful. Each week, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun. 

Masanori Itoh is working for the largest system integrator in Japan as a software engineer. He’s been involved in the OpenStack related activity of us from the very beginning. At first, he mainly contributed codes to Nova, but now he is in charge of overall architecture of systems based on OpenStack for his customers. You can follow him (mostly in Japanese) at @thatsdone.  

1. Where is your happy place? Favorite place to visit, vacation, decompress? Attach an image!

Istanbul. I visited the city for my honeymoon and was deeply impressed by the historical buildings of the old city. I thought it was such a coincidence that Istanbul and Tokyo contended for the Olympic game in 2020 this time. I’m dreaming that in the near future, the OpenStack Summit and Olympic games will both be held in Istanbul!

istanbul

 2. What do you think is the coolest thing that’s happened with OpenStack over the past three years?

For me, it was the OpenStack community effort to support Japan recovering from the Tsunami disaster at the Diablo Summit held in Santa Clara, Spring 2011.

http://www.openstack.org/blog/2011/04/openstack-conference-and-design-summit-day-1-recap/

I was deeply impressed by the community activity and gave a lightning talk there in response to the effort:

http://www.slideshare.net/thatsdone/openstack-diablo-design-summit-talk-a-lesson-from

 3. Have you organized an OpenStack meet-up/event or spoken about OpenStack at an event? What did you learn? What was the best part?

My team organized the Japanese OpenStack User Community, JOSUG, in 2010. What I learned through the activity is that Japanese customers are indeed slow to make decisions, but there are a considerable number of excellent engineers in Japan. I believe that we can introduce several new user stories to OpenStack from Japan this year or early next year.

4. Where’s your favorite place to code? In the office, at a local coffee shop? In bed?

In Train cars. 😮

In Tokyo, we have highly developed rail transportation, and I spend roughly 1 hour one way on my way to the office/back home. It’s a very good place for coding because there is no one to disturb me. 🙂

5. Define what “open source” means to you.

A software development project to which one can contribute with a reasonable contributor’s license agreement and contribution process. It’s not enough just to make the source codes open. In this sense, I love the spirit and philosophy of the OpenStack community.

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