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The Python Programming Language community in Japan will be having our first Pycon JP on August 27th at the Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology (産業技術大学院大学) in Tokyo’s Shinagawa Seaside.

Pycon JP started in the aftermath of Pycon APAC 2010 in Singapore. Pycon APAC 2011 was set to be in Singapore again but the location of the conference in 2012 had not been set yet. Yasushi Masuda , Manabu Terada and me discussed having the 2012 conference in Japan but we were afraid that the Python community in Japan did not have much experience running an event that required that level of logistics. There was a question of whether we would be able to pull together enough manpower or whether we would have to do almost everything with a core group of only a few people.

Instead of committing to hold Pycon APAC in 2012 we decided to have a mini event that we dubbed Pycon mini JP. Pycon mini JP was designed to be a modest conference of only one track where members of the Python community could get together. Being busy myself I was the only original member of our first meeting that didn’t help much planning the event, but dispite that, or more likely because of that, Pycon mini JP was held in January 2011 and was a resounding success. We had a good many submissions for talks from various fields, and it made for a very fun event.

For Pycon JP we have decided to scale up a bit and run a larger conference. Though it won’t be nearly as big as the multi-thousand person conference in the ‘states (only a few hundred people), we plan to have more participants this year and chose a larger venue. We also moved from one track to three , including one English track where I’ll be speaking about asynchronous programming in Python. We are also welcoming the wonderful Tarek Ziade as our keynote speaker.

I’ve been working with the Pycon JP planning committee and am really excited about how well things have gone. It’s really amazing how far things have come since last year at Pycon APAC and I’m amazed at how hard everyone is working to make the conference a success. I’m really proud of everyone.

Anyone who happens to be in Japan and would like to attend the conference can register here . There is a small English Information page about the conference that you can check out as well.