Around The World With MVPs: Tokyo

Here at the MVP Award blog, we love to highlight all the amazing communities our MVPs are involved in. Not only does this demonstrate just how engaged you all are, but we hope it also provides an opportunity to collaborate on events, share ideas, and bring our diverse community closer together.

That said, this week we’re pleased to highlight our community Tokyo, Japan!

More than 250 people participated in the Geek Women Japan conference there earlier this month. The free, one-day event featured 14 technical communities, which collaborated to lead sessions about their respective technologies. The aim was to bring together female engineers - regardless of what coding language they work in - to enhance technical skills and networking opportunities.

Geek Women Japan featured around a dozen sessions throughout the day, including some led by our wonderful MVPs. Azure MVP Noriko Matsumoto, who belongs to Japan Azure User Group (or JAZUG), shared general information about Azure for web designers and Visual Studio and Development Technologies MVP, Hiroka Yago, participated in a lightening talk about C# and .NET.

Even more, the conference featured a daycare center, allowing attendees to drop their kids off and take time for themselves to really focus on expanding their technical knowledge.

Check out what some participants had to say about the conference below!

“By providing the opportunity for communities, which rarely get to engage, to deliver sessions together, I believe the communities now have more respect for other developers and engineers, regardless of the platform, products, and the language they are involved in. So it’s not only the attendees, but also communities themselves, that are able to deepen engagement with one another through this event.” - Maaya Ishida, Geek Women Japan Event Organizer.

“I really enjoyed the event, which provided women the opportunity to share...information about how to face technologies, and how to work in IT industries across various technology and business boundaries.” - Aya Tokura, Microsoft Technical Evangelist.

“I’ve learned that if we want people to get to know our technologies, it is important have an attitude that demonstrates we’d like to learn about their technologies as well. This event puts that into practice very naturally through collaborative sessions, and by doing so, attendees were able to compare what’s good and bad about similar technologies. So, I’ll keep recruiting MVP candidates who can evangelize how Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies work together.” - Chiaki Matsuno, Microsoft Community Program Manager.

Did you attend Geek Women Japan? Let us know what you thought about the conference in the comments below!