Category Archives: Hopper – Anita Borg Institute

“Career Choices: Evaluating Technology Career Opportunities Among Diverse Business Sectors” was the first panel I attended at this first morning
of the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing here in Orlando, Florida.
The panelists started by introducing themselves and telling us
where we can apply to work for their companies (Semantec, Amazon,
Goldman Sachs, Medco, SAIC, and Yahoo!). I am sitting in the back
corner of a very full room. I have already been at the
conference for 3 hours: setting up then moving then setting up Sun’s
recruiting table again for the first hour, then attending the Welcome
and Keynote session. Fascinating talks by Jeanette Wing (whom I
last heard when she worked at CMU, before she started at the National
Science Foundation) and Donna Dubinsky (CEO of Palm and now Numenta)!

Work-life balance is a big topic among the panelists. Without making
little of the need, I do get tired of that phrase! In my experience
(both before and since I had my two kids), work and life are best
integrated rather than balanced. Being able to work from home sometimes,
having supportive management and family, scheduling, prioritization, and
delegation are all essential to making life work. That is, I have never
found that work and life are two different things that need balancing
but rather work is a part of my life as my family and church and
volunteer jobs and hobbies are also a part of my life. It is
all my life.

Finding work you love, being brave about continuing to search until
you find that work, always continuing to learn, and the broad range
of choices are major (standard) themes of the panel’s discussion. It seems
like most of the women asking questions are looking for work after
school. Since this is not my situation (I have a job I love!), I am
less interested in this topic.

The panel grows most interesting to me in answer to the final question
about negative work environment and
the downside of being the only or one of the few women
in a technical workplace. One of the panelists said “The jerks
will eventually disappear – fade away – become irrelevant.” Another
said: “Become competent and confident and you will outlast them.
Find mentors!” A third said: “Listen to their point of view. Also, be
stable and authentic about what you know – earn your way to respect.”
The last said: “Ask questions! The person who asks questions is the
person with the power.” Good advice.

Official
GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the
GHC Forum. You
can find me at
http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog.

I arrived earlier tonight in Orlando, Florida, to attend the

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing from today
through Saturday morning. Sun Microsystems is a Platinum Sponsor of the
conference. Sun has 10 panelists and BOF leaders as well as three of the

ten official bloggers.

Both of my flights were delayed. The most pleasant part of the trip
here was meeting the first woman cab driver I have ever had. An
auspicious start! The first person to meet me was
my daughter Jessica, also an official GHC blogger, whom I have
not seen since August when she went to college. It was a delight
to see her! We are rooming together and looking forward to
the visit as well as the conference.

I was one of the opening speakers tonight and I got to the hotel about 10
minutes before stepping up to the microphone. Robin Jeffries talked after
me and announced the 20th anniversary of
Systers, then
cut the huge chocolate Systers birthday cake. The introductory
remarks were followed by the reception and poster session.

I am still trying to make the network access in in our hotel room work.
Neither the wireless nor the cable work so far, so I am down in the
lobby using the wireless (which works fine). There are quite a
few other women sitting here in the lobby taking advantage of the
network access. Tomorrow is
our official Official Bloggers briefing but I want to get started
early. I took some good photos tonight which I will post as soon
as I get the mechanics of the hotel’s wireless sorted out.

Official
GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the
GHC Forum. You
can find me at
http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog.

Sun’s t-shirt for the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2007 (in Orlando,
Florida: October 17-20, 2007) arrived today. The front
says I -heart-

opensolaris. The heart shape is full of

DTrace (Dynamic Tracing) script. The back says “Sun Women in Engineering”
in English, Hindi, Spanish, Mandarin, Czech, and Russian.

Since she has done so much of the work to prepare for the conference, Tanya
Jankot got the first shirt. Jesse Silver gets shirt #2 since he worked through
all of the funding, design, P.O., and ordering issues to create the
shirts. Tanya had to tape the boxes shut quick before more people could
think of reasons why they should get a shirt too. The photo on
the right shows me with our third shipment of Hopper boxes and posters
about to go off to Orlando:

Tanya Jankot	Katy and Hopper Shipment:
	.

Images Copyright 2007 by John Plocher

Open Solaris is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

The Hopper conference will be held
next week (October 17-20, 2007), mostly located in the

Hilton at Disney World (Orlando, FL). The Friday Sponsor’s Night event will
be at nearby
Universal’s City Walk. As a Platinum Sponsor, we have had to make a number of
different shipments of Sun’s giveaways, conference bag stuffers, posters, marketing
materials, etc. Tanya sent our first shipment a week ago (six boxes of Sun-marked
back packs to City Walk). The second shipment goes today (conference tote stuffers).
The very cool t-shirts arrive here tomorrow, so they go into what we hope will
be the final shipment to The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, which
goes out Thursday morning. The t-shirt literally required worldwide collaboration
to design: we had contributors from China, Russia, India, and Czech Republic as
well as the USA. We are very eager to see how well they turned out.

There are a number of special things we will hand carry, including
the Sun SPOT development kit, and the
leather jacket which are Sun’s raffle prizes. Sun has 20 attendees plus 4
recruiters going to Hopper 2007. We are participating in ten panels or BOFs plus
three Sun women are

Official Bloggers. The Hopper conference takes a great deal of preparation but
it is great fun to attend: well worth all of the work!

The
ten official bloggers for the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2007 (in Orlando,
Florida: October 17-20, 2007) met by phone today. We introduced ourselves
and talked over how blogging will work at the conference. I blogged at
Hopper 2006 and am looking forward to writing up my experiences in a few
weeks at Hopper 2007. My daughter and I will both be blogging and they have
asked both of us to blog about our panel:

Girl Geeks in High School – Technical Experiences of Future Inventors.

Jessica started blogging when she went to college a few months ago; her blog
is called Feeling
Elephants. I think she started it to lower the number of update
phone calls and emails to family and friends but it has evolved. It is
a joy to watch Jessica develop her own written voice. She has written over
50 entries since July 2007.

Sun is a Platinum level Sponsor of the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2007 (in Orlando, Florida:
October 17-20, 2007). Platinum sponsors get to include an advertisement
in the conference program. Those of us working on Sun’s participation in the conference had fun picking the image and writing the text. Here is the finished version of our ad for Hopper 2007 (which we received yesterday).
Click on the images to see a bigger version.

Sun Copyright 2007, Reprinted with permission

For comparison, here is the advertisement Sun used last year (for Hopper 2006):

Sun Copyright 2006, Reprinted with permission

Since Sun is a Platinum level Sponsor of the

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2007 (in Orlando, Florida:
October 17-20, 2007), we get various opportunities to show off and
advertise. For several weeks already, Tanya Jankot and I have been
collecting already-made Sun giveaways (my favorite so far is the

Black Box squishy truck toy), and deciding whether to buy new Sun
logo pens, lanyards, flashing necklaces, or something else.

Today, we have been picking out which Sun brochures we want
to distribute, plus touring Sun’s photo library for the background
of our conference advertisement. We want an image which shows women using technology in an interesting, positive way. The image also has to have
enough neutral space for our text message. There are some very funny
pictures available.