Saskatoon's First Girl Geek Dinner

The silver lining to my first day back from two weeks of vacation was the first Saskatoon Girl Geek Dinner - an event (in Saskatoon) involving women and technology. I've known about Girl Geek Dinners for a few years, I first read about London and then Toronto - it's what SW4 (Saskatoon women of the world wide web) was, partly, inspired by.

When I found out that Melanie Cey was organizing Girl Geek Dinners in Saskatoon I was so on board. As I've mentioned before, I love to get together with others (not exclusively women) to discuss and learn about tech stuff, people, situations and strategies.

Unfortunately, the scheduled speaker for tonight didn't show. I would have liked to see her presentation, however Melanie and Emily from Point2 gave a great run-down on their switch from waterfall to agile development. Now I am very motivated to dive into "Agile & Iterative Development A Manager's Guide" by Craig Larman.

I also had the opportunity tonight to catch up with my friend Janice, who I've know for a long time - from when she was working at Northern Lights and I was a programmer at zu, she's an awesome project manager at zu.com now, it's so nice to talk to someone who has been in the industry for a while.

Speaking of veterans in the domain, Darlene Fichter was there, and to our delight had an ASUS EEE PC, 9 inch laptop running XP and an XO - the One Laptop per Child Foundation computer - a thing of beauty - so nicely designed and appropriate, every child should have one. Darlene also caught the eye of Jill Smith a CBC reporter and was seconded to an interview - looking forward to this, I respect and admire Darlene, and I'm sure she had wonderful things to say.

Dr. Julita Vassileva from Comp. Sci. at U of S, attended with some very cool grad students. She's a force and a super nice person, from my experience.

Met new friends, found a place where people actually nodded in acceptance when I spoke, no one shunned me when I spilled my wine, and I think I may be onto a process for my development team that will yield better results for all of us.

The Saskatoon Girl Geek Dinner was great, and since Melanie wants to have them about four times a year it inspires me to revive SW4. We'll see, much depends on what's happening and interest. I can only evangelize so much. A group should be made up of several people contributing, not one person constantly cajoling the others into participation - that's so far off the mark - especially in this case.