PICnet Blog

I came across an announcement for an (un)conference dedicated to the cultivation and support of women in technology called, She’s Geeky (October 22-23 in Mountain View), and thought it apropos to stake my claim on the PICnet blog– being the first female in the company as well.

I can’t say that I am more sensitive to the gender difference/inequities in technology inasmuch as the gender difference/inquities in general. I’ve been a minority within many all-male settings whether it be sports, friendships, or educational and professional settings. One of the first things I would do in my Computer Science classes in UCSB was to survey the ratio of women to men, and then white women to women of color. Rounding, I came up with the following ratios: 11% for the former, 20% for the latter.

I have chosen to accept a lot of the social morays associated with this community, while staying true to my nature: creative, outgoing, loud, and cute. (Yes, cute. Believe me, it brings it’s own set of issues to male-dominated professions.) Maybe some activists would say I have become complacent or socialized. I wouldn’t necessarily disagree, however I am who I am because of that very community I have adopted.

Having just moved to the Bay Area, it’s nice to know there is a foundation of similar support at the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. Perhaps I will be able to reflect on my formed attitudes by being exposed to a gender balanced technology community for once. And just maybe… I’ll let go of those morays that I think are so essential to my success in this profession.

And for the record, the PICnet guys are incredibly supportive. I really enjoy working here.

It’s been a full year (I know, I can’t believe it either) since I had a chance to meet many of the Joomla! folks in person at LinuxWorld SF 2006, so it was great to see Johan, Louis, Rob, and others from the Joomla! community in LinuxWorld SF 2007 this last week.

This year’s three day conference was a great opportunity to share with visitors the work the core team and patch contributors have been doing with Joomla 1.5 RC, as well as meeting new faces in the community from the Joomla! Bay Area community. I also had help this year from another PICnetter, Katie, who joined me in staffing the booth, as can be seen in our stunning Joomla-spectacular outfits below (photo courtesy of our friend Ron Severdia - which reminds me, Shakespeare fans should take a look at Ron’s masterpiece, Play Shakespeare.com, built using Joomla!).

Thanks to everyone at the conference who came to see us, including the folks from IBM and our friends across the floor at FreeBSD! Good times had by all.

The LinuxWorld SF 2006 conference was a great showing for the PICnet and the Joomla team. It couldn’t have been as successful as it was without the help of our good friends at Aspiration, including Heather Carpenter and Allen Gunn.

Unfortunately, bad things happen to good people.

When we arrived for our last morning at the Moscone Center, we found that one of the laptops graciously provided to our Joomla booth from Aspiration was stolen. A laptop stolen from the .org Pavillion, a section of the conference only to non-profit projects. Someone’s got some bad karma coming at them!

Aspiration has been such an inspiration to us, that we want to do whatever we can to help replace the stolen laptop. We encourage our PICnet and Joomla friends to give a little something to this great organization by giving a small donation to Aspiration.

I mean, look at these smiling faces. A little help to our friend Gunner (on right) and his team at Aspiration can go a long way.

During the LinuxWorld SF conference, I had a chance to sit down with the two lead developers of Joomla, Johan and Louis, and chat with them about Joomla 1.5 and some ideas that we and other members of the community have for new features in 1.5.  During the course of a lunch, Louis talked about having people begin to think of Joomla not as a content management system, but rather as a framework for building Web applications.

Pretty powerful stuff.

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With all the buzz going around at LinuxWorld SF, and with my fascination with the great hype-buzzword usage at these conferences, I thought it’d be good to list out some of the things I overheard at the conference. This list is not complete, and sometimes has nothing to do with technology, but it’s the truth, at least partly the truth.

• “AirBART!”
• “Come down from the blogosphere”
• “BART”
• “Ryan, did you take a laptop home last night?”
• “Do they really have that many globals in their code?”
• “You Joomla guys rock!”
• “What the heck is Joomla? Are you another disto?”
• “My baggage still hasn’t arrived”
• “Yes, Joomla 1.5 is coming out soon.  When?  Hmmm.  Soon!”
• “American beer?  No thank you.”
• “Another Patron tequila, please.”
• “You have to read a text file to know how to install ?

It’s been another long and successful day at the LinuxWorld for the Joomla team. Lots of foot traffic again, with some fun highlights like the FreeBSD booth showing us how you can now 2-click install Joomla from a GUI. We had some interesting internal discussions on other booths, like Splunk, which looks promising for source code indexing and searchability of log files.

But the fun didn’t stop when the show closed down for the day.

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Ah, another beautiful day in San Francisco.  Today the Joomla faithful came again to the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco.  Here’s some video from Johan and the gang preaching to the Drupal converts.

All work and no play don’t make for good Joomla friends. So, I decided that it’d be good to get the guys out to see my Oakland A’s baseball team across the bay.

After hitching a ride on BART (not to be confused with Bart or AirBART, Johan), we finally made it to the stadium, albeit about 45 minutes after the game started. With some seats in the nosebleed section, we watched the A’s crush the Seattle Mariners. Johan passed on a chance on some great American beer, but gladly joined Louis and Casey in some German brew.

Louis, a new A’s fan, tries on his hat.

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Here’s a decent video of Johnathan and Louis talking with Joomla developers on Day 2 of the LinuxWorld SF conference.

More photos from the Joomla showing at LinuxWorld SF can found in the PICnet Gallery.

Slick presentation dudes.