It’s good to be back! The past two PyCons in Japan have been online, so it was nice to be back in person where you could actually enjoy the little things in between talks like meeting and talking to other attendees and exhibitors. This year, the event took place in Ariake, Tokyo, which is home to several unique buildings like Tokyo Big Sight and Tokyo Baycourt Club.
At the time of the conference, Japan had just opened up its borders to tourists so a few people from overseas had made their way to the conference which was very nice to see.
Unfortunately, some of the English-speaking speakers were prohibited from coming because of visa issues so the track for people who couldn’t speak Japanese was a bit limited on day 1.
Day 2, however, had plenty of talks in English to choose from.
Still being careful to avoid the spread of Covid, this PyCon was a silent conference so all attendees wore audio receivers and any questions to the speakers had to be submitted online. This actually worked quite well in practice and submitted questions could be upvoted by other attendees as well.
Oh, and there was an official PyCon JP party after the second day ended where party-goers had to have tested negative on a Covid antigen test earlier that day to attend. The party had a nice atmosphere, good food and drinks, and included a few lightning talks for those that perhaps needed a bit of liquid courage before stepping in front of a crowd.
I had a lot of fun at this year’s PyCon JP, with great conversations, interesting talks, and a party on top of that! I’m definitely looking forward to the next one, hopefully without needing as much in the way of Covid prevention measures.
Below are links to the talks that were in English:
Day 1
- Keynote – Dr. Mark Shannon – The challenge of speeding up Python
- Violeta Sosa – Tracking the invisible: Geoinformatics and Human Social Behavior
- Mridul Seth – Network Science with Python
- Tushar Sadhwani – Better project maintenance with static analysis
Day 2
- Gajendra Deshpande – Security Best Practices for Django Applications
- Joongi Kim – Modernizing development workflow for a 7-year old 74K LoC Python project using Pantsbuild
- Phebe Polk – Building Pytest Plugins
- Anthony Shaw – What’s new in Python 3.11 and beyond
- Tabassum Mushtary Meem – Data driven approach to analyze the efficacy of LEED certified buildings using Python
- Raihan Seraj – Reinforcement learning for guiding swarm of robots using Python
- Dhanshree Arora – Jupyter – Under the Hood
- Murilo Cunha – Effective data science teams with Jupyter and databook
