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At PDC, Sunday night

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This is the post that I would have made last night if I had not crashed my blog. 
BIG thanks to the wonderful Tina for fixing it!

Tonight,
those of us who are helping to staff the booths had a mandatory pre-conference meeting. We
got some coaching on how to talk to people in the booth. It
was interesting, at least to me. The
funniest part was when the presenter’s computer froze, and he took some gentle ribbing
on his choice of computers. He rebooted,
doing a song and dance while it chugged along, and when he got into the presentation,
it froze again. So then he decided he’d
give up on the presentation and just give us the dirt.
(there's a pic up at https://pdc2003.textamerica.com.)
We earned how to broaden the circle of our conversation, how to deal with questions
about competitors, and most importantly, how to see you on your way ;-) We
had been promised dinner at the meeting, so afterwards they ushered us into a room
for pizza and, thankfully, salad. Oh,
and beer and snacks. They did have great
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While
I was waiting for the Women who Code BoF session tonight, I chatted with Jeff
Julian and Jeff Wolfer. Jeff
Julian made my day by having read my blog before – I believed him because of the look
of recognition when I said my name. That
was so cool. Jeff is the founder
of https://geekswithblogs.net. You
should go check it out. Just before I
started chatting with Jeff and Jeff, I couldn’t help overhearing a conversation about
the infamous Scoble. Robert
would be surprised to learn, I think, that he blogs every 10 minutes, and that he
used to be a developer but now Microsoft pays him to blog. Heh. I thought about going
over to correct at least those two misconceptions (I have no knowledge about the rumor
that he has a horns), but wanted to hear more about this amazing guy before I did. Then
I started chatting with the Jeffs, and then before I knew it, there was Julie
Lerman and it was time for the BoF. This
was the first time I’d met Julie in person, and she’s even more wonderful in person.

Although
small, the Women who Code BoF was very good and way too short. I
guess the small number is representative of the small number of women in technical
positions – generally touted at 20% but most agreed that in our experience it’s more
like 10%. (Although there were several women that I know of who hadn’t made it to
LA yet.) We talked a little about why,
and some about shared experiences (being asked to get coffee, for example, or in a
conference speaker room, “Oh, is your husband speaking”). It
was cool to see some men there, too. The
one that impressed me most was the man who has two daughters and cares about their
opportunities. He says they don’t want
to be developers, although they are good at math and science. The
time was too short and there’s so much to say about why there are so few women developers. It’s
the schools, it’s cultural, it’s businesses. And
the truth is a thread through all of that, and maybe more. There’s
a start of something here, with this group. It
will be interesting to see what happens. I
want to be a part of it.

One
of the questions that came up was why are there so few women MVP’s… I didn’t really
hear a specific answer, but if you are a woman developer (or any developer for that
matter), and want to know how to become an MVP, you can check out this
page. But I think the real answer
is to stop
lurking and start posting! Now,
today.

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