Kazuyoshi Kato / 加藤 和良

Hello! My name is Kazuyoshi Kato. I'm a Japanese software developer in Seattle, Washington.

I bought this domain, 8-p.info in 2003. I was a college student in Japan at that time. All cool hackers were having cool domains, so I wanted mine.

I'm @kzys on GitHub. I occasionally update LinkedIn. I've moved to Mastodon from Twitter.

Now

I have my Now page.

Work

I work for Fly.io.

Before that, I worked for Amazon, Mixi, AIST and Community Engine.

My "base" resume is available online.

FAQ

Kaz? Kazu? Kato?

Kazuyoshi seems long for non-Japanese folks, albeit common name in Japan. So I often use "Kaz" nowadays. I had used "Kazu" when I was in Amazon though but I dropped the last "u" to make it 25% shorter. Kato is okay, but that's my family name.

My name, in Kanji is 加藤和良. 加藤 is my family name and 和良 is my given name. Chinese people could recognize the letters since Kanji is derived from Chinese.

Japanese has another writing system, Hiragana. My name in Hiragana is かとうかずよし. Hiragana is "phonographic" whereas Kanji is "logographic". In other words, Hiragana basically represents its pronunciation, like the alphabet in English or Hangul in Korean.

Hiragana can be translated into the alphabet in English, since both are phonographic. かとう is Kato. かずよし is Kazuyoshi. The romanization system is called Hepburn romanization, which maps Hiragana characters to English alphabets.

That may be the reason I used "Kazu" in the beginning. I thought about the letters, rather than the pronunciation.

By the way, Japanese, as like Chinese and Korean, write names in the family name, given name order. I used to do that even in English, but now getting used to use the given name, family name order, especially since I live in the States.

However, the Japanese government is starting to use the family name, given name order even in English. What's a mess...