On Saturday, March 2nd, four typesafers were invited into the halls of Tokyo Institute of Technology for Scalaconf.jp. The goal of this conference was twofold: first, to promote Scala within the Japanese community, and second to bridge the gap between Japan and the greater Scala community. This event couldn’t have been more successful.
The conference featured 20 talks, including lightning talks, experience reports and best practices. From Typesafe, Jonas Bonér, Jamie Allen, James Roper and myself gave talks on Scala, Akka and Play. The most telling talks, however, were the experience reports on using Scala in real world applications.
The conference featured talks from Mitsubishi UFJ Information Technology, Geisha Tokyo Entertainment, Everforth, CyberAgent, Tech to Value, M3, DWANGO, Furyu, Advanced Soft Engineering, NTT Data Intellilink and Shanon. These reports were eye-opening for a lot of us at Typesafe. Not only is Scala active and thriving in Japan, these folks are doing some cutting edge things with Scala, and contributing back into the Open Source community.
One of my favorite questions from the conference was during the Geisha Tokyo Entertainment talk, when one concerned developer asked the audience: “Do you have any horror stories from using Scala?” The answer: “None.”
The second day of the conference was a hackathon. Here, many developers got together to work on new, or existing open source projects. At the end, we had a competition to see what the most impressive project was. Here's a list of what came out:
The conference was sold out, with 200 attendees and 70 people on the waiting list. We hope to see the energy and innovation continue!
The talks and their slides are available at Scalaconf.jp
Lastly, if you're interested in getting involved with the Japanese Scala community, here's a list of prominent members and their OSS projects:
Kazuhiro Sera
Twitter: https://twitter.com/seratch
GitHub: https://github.com/seratch
Author of ScalikeJDBC, an SQL-Based DB Access Library for Scala
Toshiyuki Takahshi
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tototoshi
GitHub: https://github.com/tototoshi
Author of play-json4s, play-ascii-art-plugin and contributor of ScalikeJDBC
Manabu Nakamura (AKA Gakuzzzz)
Twitter: https://twitter.com/gakuzzzz
GitHub: https://github.com/t2v
Author of Play20-auth, a Play2.x module for Authentication and Authorization
Kota Mizushima
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kmizu
GitHub: https://github.com/kmizu
Deputation of ScalaJP, chairman of Scala Conference in Japan and author of Jsonda
Yusuke Kuoka (AKA @mumoshu)
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mumoshu
GitHub: https://github.com/mumoshu
Author of play2-memcached, a Memcached Plugin for Play Framework 2.0
Kenji Yoshida (AKA @xuwei_k)
Twitter: https://twitter.com/xuwei_k
GitHub: https://github.com/xuwei-k
Scala, Scalaz, and Play20 contributor and SBT expert
Chris Birchall
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cbirchall
GitHub: https://github.com/cb372
Author of scala-ascii-art and ScalikeJDBC contributor
Sanshiro Yoshida (AKA nekoharu-san in)
Twitter: https://twitter.com/halcat0x15a
GitHub: https://github.com/halcat0x15a
Author of Twitter4z, a Scalaz wrapper for Twitter API
Yoshihiro Imai
Twitter: https://github.com/yoshihiro503
GitHub: https://github.com/yoshihiro503
Author of Coq2Scala and active member of the Nagoya Scala community
Tomohito Ozaki:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/yuroyoro
GitHub: https://github.com/yuroyoro
Author of svm, a Scala Version Manager
Kato Kazuyoshi
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kzys
GitHub: https://github.com/kzys
Great contribution to Scaladoc improvement in Scala 2.9.X
RKTM
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RKTM
GitHub: https://github.com/RKTM
An active member of Nagoya Scala community
By Josh Suereth, Senior Software Engineer at Typesafe
