Watching for news of OSCON again this year.  Proposal submitted, waiting for word.  The topic I proposed a year or so ago on W3C and OpenAjax Hub seems to have prepared me well for topics ongoing at work nowadays.  May this year’s proposal topic serve me as well, AND get me a ticket to Portland.  Hoping to score the trifecta: a trip to the open-source software convention, an opportunity as a girl geek to speak, and an opportunity to highlight my / my company’s role in something pretty cool.  Hoping!

Lots of proposal writing of various forms going on lately. Wrote an SBIR, which we’ll hear about in a few weeks. Advised on another. Wrote an OSCON abstract, per my norm. (Hey, one way to get more women presenting is to be one of those women who presents!) Have notes for a mobile application that I’d like to write to (1) knock some socks off at work for folks who thing I’m “only” managerial, (2) demonstrate some neat technologies that may help us in various ways, and (3) build something that’ll help make next year’s charity auction a bit simpler. While I’m doing everything else with that app, I’ll use it to make me a bit smarter on Git and push forward some ideas on building a geek community.

But all of those are just ideas on paper. They’re informed ideas, to be sure, based on reading up in various areas to make sure I’m not painting us into any corners. But they’re not working code. Need more working code. I think the challenge is to just, well, start! It’s so easy to scribble ideas, to build up that portfolio of useful things to work upon and pick from. But eventually, I’ve gotta kick my tail into gear with action, and focus in on a particular area to get some specific bit of success.

Tomorrow’s goal for the evening: download jQuery Mobile 1.0, build one screen for my auction app, and commit that screen to Git. That’s it – nothing more noble. But it gets a dev environment and two bits of visible outcome (screen + code in repository). It’s something, and something to build upon.

If it weren’t 1:00 in the morning, that would be the set for today. But time to stop procrastinating sleep…

A few folks from my company are working on putting together a ‘Young Women in Computing Day’ next month.  Women are generally under-represented in the software field, particularly in the software development field. I’ll avoid stats here, but will just say that at my last job they sent out an email to the guys in the office saying that they could no longer use the womens’ rest room since there was now a girl on staff. In my career, I’ve seen women in the requirements analysts role, women in the tester roles, women in the project leadership roles, but it’s been very rare to find women in the pure development roles. So very happy to have opportunities to expose girls to fields that are harder to expose them to then the teacher that they see in school every day or the doctor who helps them get better when they’re not feeling good.  Those roles are needed – but already have plenty of men and women heading their way.  Want to have a way to more concretely expose them to the fun they can have and the good they can do in software development – and hey, the money in the field’s not bad, either.

The Wall Street Journal recently had a section, Women in the Economy, which was the result of a conference bringing business and government leaders together to talk about what’s holding women back in the workplace.  One of the phrases that jumped out at me was the statement that women are promoted based on performance, men are promoted based on potential.  It occurs to me that part of that may be that by helping young ladies recognize their own potential in the field early, we can help escalate them up both the potential and the performance curve.  What’s more appealing to a recruiter looking to fill their slots with young talent than someone who’s been excited about technology and doing things with it for years beyond their peers?

Hoping someday to look around a technical company or a technical conference and see a better mix of men and women.  Think it’s part of my responsibility to advocate and work to help make it happen.

This past week, I was part of an interview caucus at work. In these, all of the folks who interviewed a given candidate get together to make a decision as to whether to make an offer to a candidate. Each candidate at our company is typically interviewed by 5 or more people, including a mix of technical staff and executive staff. Makes for a long stint for the candidate, but at the end of it, we’ve gotten a good sense of them and they’ve gotten a good sense of us.

Our “victim” this week was a solid contributor at his previous company who was recommended by some of our current team who’d worked with him previously. I had some concerns, though – through no fault of his, his current company wasn’t really doing anything that we’d consider particularly relevant, from a technology perspective. He’d actually argued for using more current technologies, and had eventually decided to leave based at least partially on this problem. All good, so far. The challenge was that he couldn’t tell me how he was scratching his “geek itch” outside of work, since work wasn’t doing it for him. Reading blogs? Doing some coding on the side? Couldn’t even get him to give me a list of the things he _wished_ he was doing. No extra effort to get more current, other than to raise a concern with his company that he wasn’t staying current.

All of this boils down to me to a “watch what I do, not what I say I wanna do” sort of lesson. He says he wants to be more current, but isn’t doing anything about it. I called out that attribute in the caucus. And now I’m feeling accountable to myself to a bit more. Working on an OSCON brief right now, so surveying my topic and making sure all of my points look like they’ll hang together technically. Plan to poke a few components of my brief and really push ’em to their bounds, whether or not my topic is accepted. [Desperately hoping it’s accepted… need to push myself technically, and show a few more women up there, all in one fell swoop.] Looking to build these geek opportunities into my regular work-life, as well, since I’ve become more of a team enabler and leader than technical contributor over the past year.

Oh, by the way, see what I do not just what I say is spilling over into the rest of my thinking, too… called someone else on it in the work world, but I see it hitting my Christian walk, my fitness approach, my interaction with my kids and my hubby, …. starting to feel like I need to be careful when I open my mouth!