Un Posto al Sole: Finding My Place in the Sun

The first Colorado Front Range Girl Geek Dinner was held on Thursday, March 5th, on Sun's Broomfield campus. More than 80 people attended, only one of whom was (a very brave) male.

Sun sponsored this first one with food, drink, and venue. There was plenty of interest from other individuals and businesses in helping with the next (contact me to be put in touch with the now-being-formed committee). Thanks to the many who helped spread the news (including Jeremy Tanner, who helped get the word out to startups and other smaller businesses). We had at least 80 attendees (probably more - I don't think we caught quite everybody at the registration desk), and were in touch with several dozen more who couldn't attend on this particular date but definitely want to participate.

With this kind of momentum, I think the next CO FR GGD can take place in about two months (but I'll be leaving it up to others to organize that one as I expect to travel heavily from now through July).

The atmosphere in the room was electric and inspiring, and I hope was encouraging for those who had recently lost their jobs (or fear they might soon). Women helping women can be a powerful resource in the workplace, and that's what Girl Geek Dinners are about.

^ listening to Linda, the "voice from on high"

Linda Skrocki put together a presentation which I ended up delivering (with her participating by phone) because she was home with a flu and didn't want to infect the rest of us.

Our aim was to showcase Sun's many activities in social media, in order to illustrate how other companies and individuals can use social media to enhance their own brands, win friends and clients, and influence people. Social media is important in just about any job these days, so I hope the information was useful to other women wanting to add to their work skills.

I noted a lot of interest in the room at the idea of managing one's personal brand and identity online; that might be a topic for a future talk. One attendee wanted to talk more with us about Sun's "radical transparency" in relation to a project she's working on. And it seems that people want to hear more about videoblogging, which of course I'm happy to discuss anytime.

My only (personal) disappointment was that I was so busy running the show, I had very little time to talk with anybody - and there was a roomful of fascinating women I'd love to know more about. I look forward to making up for that next time!

Thanks to Kristin Tulp of Level3, we had TV coverage, with a segment by Jodi Brooks of CBS4 news (Denver) on Friday night. As part of a series on "Beating the Recession," the piece talked about how we "Geek Girls" are rallying together to help ourselves and each other in a hard job market. I don't know whether the segment will be posted on their site. Perhaps if enough of us ask them...? Here's the transcript: 'Geek Girls' Gather In Broomfield For Networking

other coverage:

friday woman-powered businesses we love: front range girl geek dinners edition

What Girl Geeks Know

In case you're wondering about the title: Jai Ho is the Oscar-winning song from the end titles of  Slumdog Millionaire. The song's composer, A.R. Rahman, says that Jai Ho translates as "May victory be yours." Which seems to me a fitting benediction for my fellow girl geeks.

Scott Tokar of CorporateFX does a fantastic job of bringing in the public at SC08.

Update! All my SC08 student party photos now hosted here (because WordPress has a nice gallery feature that Roller lacks).

The SuperComputing conference every year attracts computer science students from all over the world who participate in various ways: as volunteers, as competitors in things like the Cluster Challenge, as part of SC's Education Program, and in a Broader Engagement initiative, run by Livermore Labs' Computing Applications & Research Department. It's a large and fascinating group, comprising students and educators from all over the world: China, India, Nigeria, Italy...

We wanted to give these students - current and future HPC developers - an introduction to Sun and our OpenSolaris HPC software developers' stack.

But they're already working hard this week, so we didn't want to lecture them. Instead, we threw a party!

We hired some local students to help (under the supervision of our own Diana Wadding), here shown blowing up balloons in the entryway of our venue, the Karma Lounge in downtown Austin. Also shown, coming in with a cooler, is Miguel of Ironworks Barbecue, who gave us full catering service with their very yummy barbecue (and a rich pasta salad for the vegetarians).

Apparently they liked it. ; )

Live music was provided by The Singhs, an international funk-rock band. 

Peter Parcek, guitar god.

We also had the DJ services of Brother Cleve with his huge collection of Bollywood music. Bhangra lessons (taught by Trishna Roy) brought lots of people onto the dance floor -  especially the Indian students, of course, but they were immediately joined by others, and we even had some interesting combinations of live rap and recorded Bollywood.

The dancers were joined by a very welcome special guest. In fact, everyone liked him so much that we gave him one of our t-shirts:

It wasn't all play: Sun folks such as Fritz Ferstl, Director of Grid Computing, were on hand to discuss current projects and the possibility of internships, and I have reason to believe we'll be hearing again from a number of these students.

The students clearly enjoyed the evening; at one point they even raised a cheer of: "Sun! Sun! Sun!" We enjoyed meeting them, and look forward to doing it again soon!

Ah, yes, my "glamorous" job... I admit it's a lot of fun, but right now I'm mostly tired. This month is  the most intense I've yet had with Sun. Here's what it's looked like so far:

Oct 23: Flew to Minneapolis.

Oct 24, 27, 28: Filmed interviews with the SAM-QFS team at Sun's Eagan, MN office, flew back to Denver.

Nov 1-6: Filmed parts of Sun's Data Management Ambassadors' conference, fortunately being held near my "home base" office in Broomfield. Especially fortunate because I still had a lot to do organizing the SC08 Student party. Worked long office hours when I wasn't behind a camera in a hotel conference room.

Nov 8: Flew to San Diego.

Nov 9: Much-needed day off (it was a Sunday!), went to the zoo.

Nov 10: Filmed an all-day ZFS Workshop at LISA.

Nov 11: Flew to Las Vegas for Sun's Customer Engineering Conference. Lunch with Barton, toured the CEC show floor, hung out and had dinner with my OpenSolaris buds, declined to go to a late show with them, went back to my hotel room, watched House.

Nov 12: Filmed an HPC track that took most of the day, plus one other presentation. In the evening, participated in a Birds-of-a-Feather session on blogging. Disagreement was, er, lively.

Nov 13: After a very bad night's sleep (my room at Caesar's was right on top of a disco), got up at 4 am to catch a 6:22 am flight to San Francisco. Lynn picked me up, already dialed in to a staff meeting. In the afternoon, moderated the chat as Lynn's presentation to Forum 2.0 was streamed online. Had a few ideas about how to do the moderator's job better, will be writing about those later. In the evening Lynn and I had a meeting with Meena, then went back to our hotel for dinner. Had an extremely hot bath - the cold water didn't work. At least the bed was very comfortable.

Nov 14: Up early again, interesting news on my iPhone. Hurried to get to Sun's Menlo Park campus for Lynn's second Forum presentation, then a dash to the airport for our flight to Austin. Arrived a little before 5, Diana about the same time from Denver, then ran into Matthew at baggage claim. Everyone's coming to town for SC08. Got our cars, I went to Spankyville, where Ross was preparing dinner for a gang of us.

Nov 15: Up at 8 to catch up on emails and run some party-related errands, then on to film at Sun's HPC Consortium all afternoon. Ended the day filming an interview with Dr. Jim Leylek. Had a quiet dinner with Dominic, went home and to sleep.

Nov 16: Up early again today for the Consortium - first speaker of the day is Andy Bechtolsheim, so sleeping in is not an option! Will be leaving early (Peter will take over the camera) so I can go help set up the venue for the party. That will run til about 2 am, and I'm supposed to be back filming at 8:30 on Monday. Then there's the SC08 show opening Monday night, and I'll be filming on the show floor Tuesday through Thursday.

I hope to survive until next Saturday, when I leave for warmer climes and something resembling a vacation. I should note that this month has been equally intense for practically everybody at Sun!