Meanwhile, at Grace Hopper...

In between weddings both this weekend and last, I made it out to Phoenix for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. I gave a talk at Open Source Day about starting in open source. Rikki Endsley of Red Hat wrote up a summary of my talk, and Serena Larson of ReadWrite wrote an article based on the talk and a brief interview we did beforehand. My slides are here.

[There’s a lot I could say about the male allies panel and Satya Nadella’s keynote but others have said it better than I could.  ]

I’ll limit myself to two remarks. First, I am not against the idea of including allies at GHC or most other feminist or women-centered spaces, but that inclusion has to be done thoughtfully, with real allies and not just corporate sponsors posing for publicity. Second, it’s worth noting that GoDaddy is planning to IPO sometime in the next year. If they’re successful, perhaps because the public no longer thinks of them as misogynists, GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons stands to make even more money for his hard work creating a financially troubled company and, oh yeah, blatantly objectifying women.  Not a bad deal if you can get it.