The title of this post is an oblique way of describing the “Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing” conference. Grace Hopper was an admiral. “Hop” is the first part of her last name, and also the name of the volunteers that get free tickets. I am volunteering for some things, but my free ticket came from a different source (my current indirect-employer, Groupon, about which I know relatively little)

Unlike many previous years, I am not focusing on going to talks at GHC15, although I do consider the variety of this talks this year very good and a must-go. Instead I will be making connections, mentoring, sitting at various tables for various groups, talking to people, and going to talks when I find time.

My goals (ordered list):

  1. Meet and connect with the 5 IIT students that I am helping sponsor to be here. (Update: I give myself a B-)
  2. Fulfill my promises with regards to mentoring slots. Mentor well. (Update: I give myself a D)
    • lunchtime table talks total failure; no one could find it and no one came.
    • Mentoring tables were cool but I was not useful
  3. Show up on time for my table slots. Don’t be absurdly terrible at whatever it is that people who sit at tables do. (Update: I give myself an F)
  4. Meet and connect with as many as possible of the 70 people coming here from my current parent-company, Groupon (Update: I give myself a C-)
  5. Greet and reconnect with awesome ThoughtWorkers (Update: I give myself an A-)
  6. Greet and reconnect with the many people I already know who will be at the conference, especially those I met at previous conferences (Update: I give myself a B)
  7. Attend and mingle at the various LGBTQ events (Update: I give myself a B-) X. Attend awesome talks (Update: I give myself a B-) X+1. Swag and meeting awesome new people and hearing their stories! (Update: I give myself a B+)

Fears

Fears? More like certainties. It will be impossible to do all the things I want to do; I will not do perfectly at the things that I have promised to do. I will be tired, and probably cranky, and want lots of things that are impractical to have or pursue. But I think I will still be better off than if I had not come.

Talks

Ezgi, who works at PROS, talking about Big Data (*sit) Bloomberg - portfolio managements

explore teh hilton 12:45 session

Long lunch w/ Pl Suprised in hallway. I am a doofus, why do

Not a huge fan of the app, the venue, the staff, especially not the badge readers…

talks attended: 2:15 wednesday, how to avoid bad things happening to you at work, then internet of things, with space satellites

value gained per head per talk. unmeasurable, but totally a thing.

people a, b, c in talk X a gets 3 qualia ( new-to-them knowledge retained, in whatever format- paper, tweets, brain-only) b gets 300 qualia c gets 12 qualia Average: 171.x, total 315

talk y had 50 ibservers who had an average of 15 qualia each. Total qualia is 750. Average: 15, total: 750.

The goal is to keep both average and total high. x

Total goddamn nonsense on teh Distributed Computing slide

To me, GHC is the problem. It is deeply non-technical. The OSS track is registration-only. Too much towards total qualia vs average qualia- just add more people!

Emily Tsai - PwC - beacons

GHC makes me less technical

http://www.prg.com/ does the slides

biggest chrome complaint- injected ads, settings hijack Safe Browsing team

download all executables on the internet Chrome cleanup tool

to read http://juliepagano.com/blog/2014/12/13/annotated-male-allies-panel/

https://www.google.com/chrome/cleanup-tool/

mentoring session, lgbt session

Notes for next time: DO wear GHC tshirt while commuting. DO dye hair first (?) DO prioritize people above talks. DO submit the maximum number of talk proposals. DO be working for TW but not the booth.

BuzzFeed talk was probably good. Talk about challenges of offline mode / Breadcrumb?

katherin Nos, SAP

Yayyyy dude said that I was useful on hipchat!! (brian Mcallister- invited me over to the dark side :) )

mary meekers internet report https://recode.net/2015/06/09/mary-meeker-takes-you-on-a-tour-of-the-2015-internet-trends-report-video/

I give zero shits about how much moe important than me you are. I will wield my terrible sense of humor upon you equally. Only my amount of pos-discussion self-flagellation will be in proportion to your job title.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianmccallister

honolulu code bootcamp

Actually DO a bootcamp maybe.

http://www.ghsa-k12-ca.us/

Offer twitter coffee?

Post-GHC15 meetup at groupon?

http://smile.amazon.com/Getting-More-Negotiate-Succeed-Work/dp/0307716902?sa-no-redirect=1

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https://twitter.com/lifeatgoogle

TIL http://icegreen.com/greenmail/ “GreenMail is an open source, intuitive and easy-to-use test suite of email servers for testing purposes.”

Went to mindy’s talk. tweeted. :)

I wish I’d gotten to the NASA talk but maybe that would have been weird

I should work from palo alto someday and meet gaythri and say hi to Plane and hang out with Paul on Sunday

Popma apply to https://twitter.com/BestBuy_Careers

https://t.co/ABln3FxTxU Joelle Emerson ‏@joelle_emerson 2m2 minutes ago Want to measure how inclusive your tech co is? @prdgm and @CultureAmp are designing a survey to do just that! #GHC15 https://medium.com/@PRDGM/paradigm-culture-amp-partnering-to-design-an-inclusion-survey-3bb7b317348a …

google compute engine networks

https://twitter.com/maybekatz/status/654787287167799296 Kat Marchán ‏@maybekatz 3m3 minutes ago #ghc15 they are literally handing cookies to a guy at the Cisco booth. 😂

John Furrier ‏@furrier 58s58 seconds ago New term I just learned #wogrammer not to be confused with #brogrammer https://twitter.com/wogrammer #ghc15 http://www.via-cc.at/63f7p

Read the original lean in whitepaper?

https://storify.com/cczona/tech-women-give-keynote-addresses-at-tech-conferen

https://twitter.com/cczona/status/654769529701031936w

Change handle somewhere to binjali

wogrammer https://twitter.com/wogrammer

IIT meetup- schedule ahead of time- meetup.com group / calendar, twitter? Swag courier?

IIT writeups agitate to get it done. Follow up. Within the week.

I always dislike “fireside chat” format for keynotes Roman • 1 min Roman Kofman Same. It’s a lot easier on the speaker. Like pair programming for the stage

hagtag oyyy

“And every day I wrote down three things that I did well. Some days it was hard. ‘Made tea.’” And three things I messed up.

Most useful swag. Socks? Chargers. Cords and batteries. Stickers? Headphones?

Some people want to be happy. I am not impressed by happiness. How about let’s build good things, take care of our peoples, and be frustrated and confused and terrified and grumpy and all my favorite emotions that are not happiness.

“Why is it so hard to get into facebook?” 11k employees

http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-night-alexa-lost-her-mind/

“give the audience advice”

lean in circle lol

be ambitious

http://leanincircles.org/chapter/sf-bay-area

I wish I’d made it to this one NUIT Research ‏@NUITResearch 2m2 minutes ago Women tech leaders in govt. take the stage! @kathytpham @sheiladcusa @ultrasaurus @tweet_audrey @vivigraubard #GHC15 https://twitter.com/NUITResearch/status/654801380595470337

Remind IIT students - Hopper next year- free ticket for 8 hours work, great way to meet people

Seattle groupon

TODO Email people whose cards I have TODO compile and research and post notes including phone notes

It frustrates me that it is hard to know what the things that you could take advantage of. Encouraging the crowd to yell louder and telling them that you are judging them on it

Speaker http://cs.union.edu/~barrv/

When it is grad school time, go to a conf and meet all of them.

Ideal GHC experience? Speaker on first day, mentor on afternoon of first day.

http://womendev.acm.org/who_we_are/profiles/barr.cfm

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rcwang/ CoBot learning Data Richard Wang

lol daleks

Door opening robot

Not revolutionary, but novel (robots asking humans for help)

https://www.google.com/search?q=door+opening+robot&oq=door+opening+robot&aqs=chrome..69i57.2575j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8 http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~asaxena/openingnewdoors/openingnewdoors.pdf

Grad school gotta be CMU https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~srosenth/pubs.html

The robot escorts visitors to her office :) :)

Robot soccer is amazing

Baxter robot http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/ http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/baxter/

Houston again next year?

Grouponer https://twitter.com/gayathrikamath

Jenni snyder yelp cool dress, red on teh bottom

if/we company?

https://angel.co/if-we-1

gnu mailman core contributor

Knitting onstage - how I survive standards meetings

http://gracehopper.anitaborg.org/ghc-community-blog/ghc15/ http://systers.org/wiki/communities/doku.php?id=wiki:ghc:ghc15

First rule of lockpicks: don’t pick any locks that you depend on

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Spafford

“Half the libraries on the list were some dude’s first jQuery project”

“Get the letter from Stallman”

Diplomacy skills!!!

“Internet bug bounty”

AFL fuzzing tool

Disney android/ios do ittttt

http://cvechecker.sourceforge.net/

on firee!!!!

kerberos bug?

snort before sourcefire before cisco raw packet data nmap

boringSSL Which is your favorite openssl fork?

DEFCON

2600 mtg! bsides!

friend at defcon!! there for work!!! Yes!! Terri! @terriko

antivirus companies decompiling patches, writing reproductions of vulns

The “this is my first presentation” track

NASA Annette Moore CIO http://women.nasa.gov/annette-moore/ http://schedule.gracehopper.org/session/data-science-nasa/ DOROTHY RASCO of NASA DEBORAH DIAZ of NASA CATHERINE COLEMAN of NASA ANNETTE MOORE of NASA

Mission control on ISS! Email!

Julie Ann Horvath ‏@nrrrdcore 3h3 hours ago Last night I was super lucky to speak at #notGHC at the @chain office in SF.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ghc-dinner-tickets-18786080673 “my guys” aww

Johnson space center “As you can see, at NASA we’re really a family” what does that even meeeean Why calling work family is weird

Data science - public- how to make it accessible?

SpaceApps challenge - every April

http://www.forbes.com/sites/coelicarr/2011/10/18/5-reasons-why-bosses-and-co-workers-can-never-be-just-like-family/

TW panel! #TechAtAnyAge

Courtney is super interested in the “coworkers are not family” post http://www.forbes.com/sites/coelicarr/2011/10/18/5-reasons-why-bosses-and-co-workers-can-never-be-just-like-family/ http://www.askamanager.org/search-results?q=family

groupon green nail polish

Ending keynote meh

Chase the rarer opportunities. Make good things happen.

TODO send the pic for IIT to cusgsjn

ending keynote:

head of the atent office

Janet George, SanDisk

https://twitter.com/ZayoGroup hiring at ghc

https://twitter.com/hashtag/LeadTheCSuite?src=hash

Lots of people can recognze Grace and Ada now. Enchantress of numbers!

Typing in the dark at #ghc15 (and other conferences) has dramatically improves my touch typing, or maybe just revealed it.

Seriously, do a thing with hadoop. Just stand it up and do a data sample.

https://twitter.com/terriko/status/655107688041283584

Yay meetup with Kate! Yayyyy Plane party ^^

Isis Anchalee isis@ilooklikeanengineer.com real talk. lolwin.

ilimunate Dance is so cool

TODO setup coffee w/ Ayaka!

TODO visit Houston and stay with https://www.facebook.com/k8manwaring maybe? She offered :) :)

People over conference talks

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~robosoccer/small/ blog post

contact mentee

Chelsea

311 SF app

JavaOne Plane ?

ham radio license - book?

Book day! / evening ritual?

Dickens fair doing the same thing two years in a row

TODO go to alicorn dinner

Hamilton soundtrack

Watch legally blonde

Schedule a Houston weekend in winter… check for weather. Ask Aub! Ask Katy Manz for couch? Ask Plane for advice…

Make a better postcards stash - get photos from phone to computer. Maybe in Picasa?

Oakland Katya identityWoman

Julia Walker, Google (middle age)

team treehouse- recommmended learning resource

kaggle - resource for learning datascience

sirens conf - fantasy

People

  • Met up with an old college friend (Katy) who happens to live in Houston after the last plenary and before the party :)
  • Met coworker BMcA in person

  • Hung out with coworkers MS and HC; met some other coworkers for the first time

Surroundings

  • Houston seems pretty cool; I would definitely visit again and go to museums, restaurants etc.

Takeaways

  • There were surprisingly few people who felt like “my clan”. This seems odd to me. I might be doing it wrong.