What happened? Last Monday in Seattle I ran logistics for a monthly meetup. I secured the speaker, arranged the room, and secured us food. I wanted to make it an awesome event because I’ve enjoyed working with the technology in question and have even given a few talks on the subject. We had a lot of interest from the Seattle community, the speaker gave a fantastic presentation, and answered a bunch of great questions at the end....
I was really excited for this particular session, as big data an area that people are increasingly tackling, with fascinating results. The panelists included Janet Ramey who is a Senior Director at Cisco, Moira Burke who is a data scientist at Facebook, and Eva K. Lee who holds a professorship at Georgia Tech. Monica Martinez-Canales, a Principal Engineer at Intel, hosted the panel. We started with a broad overview of that question everyone’s asking: what is big data anyway?...
As I walked into this session led by Francine Gordon (F Gordon Group) and Sabina Nawaz (Sabina Nawaz Consulting), I was a little surprised. Instead of rows of chairs facing the front, it looked like we were about to sit down to an organized lunch. Worksheets On the tables were worksheets for attendees to fill out, looking something like this: If you’ve filled out any psychological survey, there’s a high probability that you’ve ranked statements like the ones that were on this sheet, including:...
This session focused on how to build diversity within user groups, told through Jessica McKellar’s experience with the Boston Python User Group. She gives compelling reasons for wanting diversity within these groups, including the development of the group as a community and growing the size and leadership of the community. Goals Jessica set out with the goal to increase the number of women participating by 15%, to showcase women engineers, and to start a movement....