#GHC19

I've spent the past few days at #GHC19, aka the 2019 Grace Hopper Celebration in Orlando, FL. I had heard about this conference for several years, and this was my first year attending.

Thoughts and feelings

  • It is a mega-conference! 25,000 attendees! 😱
  • I felt like I was living in the last few panels of Y: The Last Man, i.e. a world of women.

yorick

Y: The Last Man, issue #60

  • It was super inspiring, more on the meta (yeah! ladies in tech!) than on specific, technical talks. Though I did wrap up the conference with a long list of TODOs: Julia, Go, Rust, Spark, maybe I should build that Clojure web app...
  • So apparently company t-shirts are a thing; there were gangs of roving Googlers, Amazon(ians?), Facebookers, etc. This was similar to the family vacation t-shirts I saw in the Disney parks at night: Ambroz Disney Family Vacation 2019! Part of me considers it tacky; most of me hungers for such a t-shirt...
  • Speaking of Disney, I completed Disney Tech's coding challenge and won a t-shirt! 🎉
  • I also really enjoyed the challenge - where do I find more puzzles?!
  • In other t-shirt news, I made (and had accepted) two open source PRs - one on papers-we-love and one on pandas. This puts me at 50% towards Digital Ocean's Hacktoberfest promise of:
make 4 PRs to open source projects
+
in October
+
be in the first 50k people to do this
=
get t-shirt

LET IT BE KNOWN THAT I WILL CODE FOR T-SHIRTS.

Some history

Grace Hopper (1906-1992) was...

"...an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first linkers."

wiki

She, along with Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), are kind of the matron saints of Women in Tech. They are eerrrrrywhere.

I have many thoughts and feelings about Women in Tech. The shortest distillation is: I think we're at an interesting point in history right now, and I'm hopeful. I also love being a Woman in Tech. I love my job. I love (and sometimes dread the future of?!) my career.

We're at the groundswell of a reaction against a weird, Mad Men/marketing-driven gendering of tech which started in the 80s and basically gatekept-with-a-padlock a generation of women (and thus a generation of minds) from an industry; right when it was getting so important, socio-economically (the dotcom bubble! the commercialization of the Internet! web 2.0! social media!).

So I'm glad that there are these big, grand, moneyed gestures that shout about diversity and inclusion from the convention center rooftops. Indeed! More women in tech! Keep women in tech! And I appreciate that there are lots of opportunities to increase the number of women in tech:

(I put an * next to the ones I economically benefited from - as in, I either got a job, got better at my job, or just got plain ol' cash.)

And so on. I think that's great. I also think there are powerful economic reasons - both from the labor supply and labor demand sides - that make Women in Tech a very worthwhile objective indeed. Efficiency! From the labor demand side, the need for software devs is expected to grow "much faster than average" - that is, 21% increase over the next ten years (as opposed to the average of 5%). From the labor supply side, I'm inspired by Claudia Goldin's work noting that tech jobs - and any jobs that allow flexibility in how you get your work done - can close the wage gap.

Thanks

Speaking of moneyed gestures, thanks to

who provided me with the funds and the opportunity to attend this year. It was a real privilege!