Girl Geek Dinner : Continuing on Computing Ideas Through the Ages - How Nerdy Women Help Each Other and More

This June, geeky girls over three generations gathered at the Atlassian office in Sydney city- all anticipating a night of great ideas about engineering and IT with delicious pasta, drinks and chocolate.

The first speaker, Peggy Kuo, a developer at Atlassian, shared with us various tips on how to make websites extra 'shiny'. By using HTML5 to give the site structure and content, then further polishing it with CSS3, websites become a lot more representative. She also recommended some other sites that may assist the audience to finding or making better website templates.

The second speaker, Deborah Martin, a retired software engineer, shared with us her joy in teaching seniors, especially elderly women over the age of 55, on how to use a computer. She discussed the reasons and benefits of why these women turn to her and her computer club in Parramatta for help in learning about technology. Her work also extends to educating the elderly about internet scams, security on the net and online banking. She has found that seniors are more eager to learn and in particular, her course on how to use Facebook is very popular with seniors, who hope to understand their children and grandchildren by keeping up with the internet trend.

The last speaker, Nabeelah Ali, a frontend developer at Atlassian, shared with us a slice of her life story from engaging in programming since she was young to finishing her mechatronics engineering degree and now to being a programmer. She also discussed findings from the Flow Theorem. In particular, she emphasized the importance of uninterrupted time - 'being within the zone' and how it has contributed to the success of others. Nabeelah also voiced her opinion that open plan office space may not work in helping individuals stay 'in the zone'.

In friendly but no less nerdy company, the evening ended with an open floor shout-out of job offerings, job seeking and the promotion of other events that other girl geeks are organizing, followed by much socializing, applause and laughter.

For those who missed out on this fantastic event, don't you worry! The next event will be around the corner and it's absolutely fine to have gents come along too!

By Jenny Lui, Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical & Mechatronics), UTS

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Sydney Geek Girl Dinner - April 2012

With a name like The Altassian and a location on Sussex Street I was expecting an upmarket bar overlooking the water, but as I was welcomed into the lower ground floor of a company which informally lists its purpose as ‘creating useful products people lust after’ and values such as ‘open company, no bullsh!t’. I was not disappointed. Pizza was lined across one wall, fridges full of drinks on another, and all around the room a group of smiling and welcoming faces affirmed that I was in the correct location.

Fresh slice of pizza in one hand, bottle of red wine in the other I mingled with the other attendees, some of which like Sarah, an auditor from Westpac, were first-timers here like me, and others like Georgie – a chirpy peroxide blonde coder, who was a veteran of the geek girl dinners.

The first speaker of the night was Paula, a psychiatrist who took a mid-career plunge into HR consulting in the sports world and was working at Altassian on a sports website (www.knowthegame.com.au) had three pieces of life advice based on sport (as she was a self-confessed sport’s nut).

• Know the game – linking this to netball she identified that we should know what position we are playing and what the rules of the game were.
• Work as a team – involving not only knowing what our roles were but that of others, likening this to rugby she highlighted the importance of communication in a business.
• Know yourself. Learn to adapt and change – linking this in with her sailing experiences she reminded us to work with the wind, know where our end goals are and read the current conditions, set a goal and work for it.

 

The next speaker was more true to the geek girl theme, Sasha Bermeister, a 3^rd year USyd student who won the Anita Borg scholarship gave us an introduction and tutorial on Markdown – a markup language that was used to create webpages, pdf’s and other documents. For those that are new to what a markup language is, she defined it as ‘a way of describing how a document looks, inside the document’, likening it to a more simple verion of other languages such as html, latex, and restructured text.

As the questions came to a close, and she urged those who were interested to contact her (at sbermeister@gmail.com).

Tonight’s Geek Girls Dinner was an informative, and informal experience that was quite enjoyable, even for someone who had the coding ability of excel, like me. There was a wide range of women and girls from all ages attending, from industry professionals, students and overseas. All the speakers were bright, passionate and clearly loved what they were doing with their lives.

Anyone who is working in the industry, or a self confessed geek is invited to attend the Geek Girls Dinner, which meet regularly and are friendly to all.

Captain Frankie – signing out!
(BEngDipEngPrac-Mechanical)

More information can be found at: www.girlgeeksydney.com

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