Grace Hopper Celebration: Speaking and Connecting

Grace Hopper Celebration is my favorite conference of all times. Every time I go, I learn new things, make new friends, and come home energized. This year I am very honored to be accepted as a speaker, to share my experience as a female software engineer.

Letter to my younger self

The title of my talk is Letter to my younger self: Things I wish I knew when I first started working. I have made so many mistakes in my career that I wish I could go back and point myself in the right direction. Alas, I do not own a TARDIS, but I could pass the information to current students.

Once I came up with the talk idea, I invite two friends, Rupa Dachere and Christina Schulman, to present with me. They have quite a bit more experience than me, and we weave our stories together into the talk.

Me, Christina and Rupa

Speaking to a full house

When we got to the conference, we were rather surprised by the room assigned to our session. It was quite big, with 350 chairs (yes we counted). We anxiously watched people slowly filling the room, until all the chairs were all taken. Every single one of them. The ushers were actually turning people away!

View from the stage

We divided the talk into three parts: career, networking and negotiations. For negotiations, we lightened the mood quite a bit by demonstrating the techniques with skits. People loved it.

We were ruthless in cutting material from the talk to make sure we leave plenty of time for questions, for I always felt that is the best part of GHC sessions, the interaction at the end.

All in all the session went really well. It was a pity we didn't record the whole talk, but our session blogger, Lexy Holloway, types unbelievably quickly. She has a very comprehensive session report that is practically the transcript!

For more information on our talk, here is a collection of links: http://bit.ly/ghc12-letter

Data science and cats

I was busy rehearsing all the way until our presentation, so I missed quite a lot of sessions. Now that I think about it, I only attended a single one during the whole conference. It was Short URLs, Big Data: Learning about the World in Realtime by Hilary Mason. What an outstanding talk! It was a great balance in technical details, insightful anecdotes, and humorous slides.

This slide, for instance, had me laughing uncontrollably. Hilary used it to illustrated that what we share is not what we click. People share links that reflects well on them, but privately they read very different things. Just like the cat dressing up as a chicken, we use sharing to groom a public appearance.

Hallway Track

Although I only went to a single session, I felt I benefited a lot from the conference nonetheless. I love to hang out in the hallway, wave at people I knew from previous conferences, and reconnect. We met over breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks, even in the swimming pool. Each of us brought friends, made introductions, and expanded the circle of camaraderie.

I am actually very glad that I spent the majority of my time on the hallway track, to connect with women from all walks of technology, to support each other, to celebrate our achievements. This is the best part of Grace Hopper Celebration!

Grace Hopper Celebration: It's all about connections

As I am sitting in the Portland airport waiting for my flight back to San Francisco, I look back at the great times I had at the Grace Hopper Celebration last week. This is my third time attending GHC, and I always come back fully energized. What makes GHC so wonderful? It's all about connections.

Connecting to others like you

It can feel lonely being a woman in a male-dominated field like computer science. Simply being in the same venue with almost 3000 other women sends a very strong signal: you are not alone. As you sit in various sessions, you get to meet people in the same situation as you. You realize that you are a victim of the Imposter Syndrome, that everyone in the room also thought they got to where they are because they are lucky, not because they are good. You chat with the woman sitting next to you at lunch, making a deep connection because both of you are a few years into your job and unsure what to do next. You swap tips, you hear great advice, you share your stories, and you immerse yourself in the solidarity of your fellow women in computing.

Connecting to others unlike you

While it is energizing to meet people just like you, it is also empowering to see women thriving in so many different ways. You see a young professor doing groundbreaking research. You see a mother of six going back to school for a PhD and loving it. You see an executive taking the helm of a large corporation. You see an undergrad leading a non-profit project and making an impact. It shows you that success comes in many different sizes and shapes, and opens your eyes to the possibilities of greatness for yourself.

Connecting to yourself

When was the last time you took time to think about yourself and your career? At Grace Hopper Celebration, you step away from your daily responsibilities and think about the big picture. What I want to do? How do I get there? You are surrounded by amazingly supportive people, helping you recognize your achievements, hearing your fears and concerns, giving you tips and advice, and urging you to take charge of your future. You feel energized because you got to lift your head above the daily grind and see what's out there in the horizon. Your newfound connections let you know that you are not alone, that others before you have struggled and succeeded, and wherever you want to go, you will get there. It's a wonderful feeling.