Congratulations to Our New PSF Fellows: Donghee Na and Takayuki Shimizukawa
When the Python Software Foundation announces a new batch of Fellows, I still open the list the same way. I scroll down looking for names I recognise from our part of the world.
This year, that habit has been rewarded three times in a row.
The PSF announced the Q3 2026 cohort on October 19. Four people were recognised, and two of them are active members of the Python Asia community:
- Donghee Na from Korea
- Takayuki Shimizukawa from Japan
Congratulations to Paul Moore and Aldo Caneo as well, who complete the batch.
Add Donghee and Takayuki to the three Fellows from Q1 and the two from Q2, and that makes seven PSF Fellows from East, South, and Southeast Asia in the first three quarters of 2026. On this site we count, and seven is a number we have not seen before.
Congratulations to both. The recognition is earned.
Donghee Na
Donghee Na has been a CPython core developer since 2020. If you use Python 3.13 or 3.14, you have used his work. He has contributed to the Faster CPython project, to free-threaded CPython (PEP 703), and to the experimental JIT. He also maintains pyperf and pyperformance, the tools the core team uses to measure whether Python is actually getting faster.
He served on the Python Steering Council for 2025, and core developers re-elected him for the 2026 term. The Steering Council is the five-person group that makes the final decisions about the language. In his 2026 nomination, he wrote about the decisions on free threading he took part in, including PEP 779. He does all of this as a part-time contributor, while leading the Python Language Team at Karrot (당근) in Korea.
What matters most for us is what he does with that position back home. Donghee has run CPython sprints at PyCon Korea and other events in the region for years. At those sprints, he sits down with people and helps them land their first pull request in CPython. He gave a keynote at PyCon Taiwan 2025, ran a sprint at PyCon KR 2025, and gave an online charity talk for PythonAsia.
Getting more core developers from Asia does not happen through good intentions. It happens because someone like Donghee is in the room at the sprint, pointing at a good first issue. That is the work this Fellowship recognises.
Takayuki Shimizukawa
Takayuki Shimizukawa met open source through Zope2 in 2003 and has used Python ever since. He has been a co-maintainer of Sphinx since 2011. If you have read the official Python documentation, or the docs of a large part of the Python ecosystem, you have used his work too. He also maintains sphinx-intl, the tool that makes it practical to translate Sphinx documentation into other languages. For a region where most developers do not read English as a first language, that tool matters a great deal.
His community work in Japan goes back just as far. He was Vice-Chair of PyCon JP 2012 and 2013, ran the accounts for PyCon JP 2014, and today is the Accounting Director of the PyCon JP Association. He organises Sphinx-users.jp and the Python mini Hack-a-thon, a regular event where Japanese Pythonistas meet and work on their own projects together.
He has also written or translated more than a dozen Python books into Japanese. These include the Japanese editions of Expert Python Programming (four editions, from 2010 to 2023), The Self-Taught Programmer, and The Self-Taught Computer Scientist, plus chapters in Python Professional Programming and the Learning Sphinx series. A large share of the Japanese developers who learned Python in the last fifteen years learned some of it from a book that Takayuki wrote or translated.
He was also one of our speakers at PythonAsia 2026 in March. He built presentation slides with Pyxel, a retro game engine with 16 colours and 4 sound channels, and then presented with them. That is the kind of person he is.
One more detail. Takayuki works at BeProud, the same company as Takanori Suzuki, who became a Fellow in Q2. Two Fellows from one Tokyo company in back-to-back quarters says something about what happens when a company lets its engineers give time to the community.
What This Means
Look at what these two people do. One works on the inside of the interpreter and on the council that decides where Python goes. The other builds the tool that documents most of the ecosystem, and has spent years teaching Japanese developers through books and events. Neither is a niche contribution. Both are global contributions that happen to come from Asia.
That is the point PAO keeps making. The work in our region is already happening, and it is already at this level. What has been missing is the step where someone writes it down and sends it to the PSF.
As I wrote in April, East, South, and Southeast Asia together held roughly 4% of all PSF Fellowships, against a developer population far larger than that share. Seven Fellows in three quarters moves that number. It does not close the gap. Only more nominations will do that.
What I Want You To Do After Reading This
Three things. In order.
- Send a congratulations to Donghee or Takayuki if you know them, or even if you only know their work. If you have ever sat in one of Donghee's sprints or read one of Takayuki's books, tell them. The recognition lands harder when it comes from peers.
- Write down the name of one person in your local Python community whose work has been overlooked. Just one.
- Nominate them before November 20, 2026. The PSF is accepting Q4 2026 nominations until that date. Send an email to psf-fellow@python.org with a description of the person's Python work and their email address. The criteria are on the PSF Fellows page.
That gives you less than a month. If you are not sure how to write a nomination, the Q1 post explains what the committee looks for: specific events, specific projects, specific years. If you want help with the draft, get in touch with PAO.
Congratulations again to our two new Fellows. We are proud of you, and we are watching to see who you bring up next.