Czajkowski

Who knew it’d be next to impossible to find a free evening to meet some friends, finally we found a Sunday to meet up and have some brunch.

Most folks know I’m not from Dublin, and while it’s great here, I have a job and live in a nice place  and a lot of the Ubuntu folks are here I miss hanging out with mates and just going for a chin wag over a cup of tea.  When I first moved up I was invited to a Girl Geek Dinner.  Not sure what it was or where it would lead to, but I’m damn glad I went as I’ve met some great friends there and I look forward to the discussions we have.

I have to first say there are not that many Ubuntu women over here, but that’s fine I don’t mind. It’s nice just to meet other women in technology and we discuss random bits of stuff happening in Ireland. Events, conferences, new technologies, showing off the new phone we’ve brought to lunch and just general hanging out.

I finally got to catch up with Martha, Ana and Andrea for brunch two weeks ago after not getting a chance to meet up since November before Jaime went back down under to Oz and left Ireland.  I thought I’d introduce you to folks over here that I interact with in the women in technology area who like me embrace technology, go to conferences and get our Geek fixes by talking about gadgets and new technologies.

Martha Rotter – Is a technology evangelist, and  has been her whole life.  There’s very little she find boring.  She’s  that kinda geek who can’t wait to try out everything new and shiny.  And when  she  find things she loves, she can’t help but share her enthusiasm with others who might benefit from new technology.  Lucky enough that this is now her full time job, she spends time with developers in Ireland and Northern Ireland working on brand new tech in areas like web applications, video games, robotics, 3D, touch interfaces and more.  When  not in front of a computer or a crowd, you can probably find her at community events like OpenCoffee, BarCamp, Age Action or Girl Geek Dinners.

Ana Nelson – Having fallen in love with programming while studying for her Ph.D. in economics, she now develop open source software and write web applications. Currently  she works as an investment analyst based in Dublin, Ireland and loves to build tools to analyze and visualize data, run simulations and automate anything boring. She spoke at OSSBarcamp and hopefully she will do again.

Andrea Magnorsky – Andrea is a professional software developer and has accrued many years of experience building solid applications. Looking for ways to improve code she came across Rails and the Castle stack, which includes Monorail. Andrea is heavily involved in the organisation of Alt Net in Dublin.  She is also involved in Ruby Ireland as she has a growing interest in Ruby. Andrea liked the Castle stack so much that she co-developed an eCommerce solution using Monorail in her spare time.

These are just some of the cool women I get to meet in Ireland working in technology, it’s fascinating the diverse topics that come up and the lengthy and interesting conversation we have. I don’t necessarily get to meet women in Open Source, but that’s fine. Meeting others from different groups and areas leads to more discussions and learning from one another.

Folks may have missed this or indeed just don’t know the new shape up for the Ubuntu Women Project.

Since UDS Lucid we’ve been working on some changes as a team, most know about the Ubuntu team leader, but also a big change was the decision to have a LOGGED CHANNEL. These came about from discussions and meetings discussing the IRC purpose, as again the team is more than IRC.

Many many conversations were happening on IRC and not on mailing list of indeed the forums.  If you weren’t on IRC you missed the information or indeed the lengthy and interesting discussions taking place.  The idea to create a logged channel means if you don’t IRC, not on IRC at the time, and perhaps you don’t run a screen session you don’t lose out on these conversations and discussions, you can catch up and read the logs like many other teams.

We now have two channels and I’d like to point out to folks to perhaps join and update their autojoin

#ubuntu-women-project is the new channel created, it is the logged channel for the Ubuntu Women Project This is the Ubuntu, technical, and project discussions take place, of course social chat is going to happen.

#ubuntu-women is the non logged channel should there be a need to discuss private issues that people may not want logged, it is also marked as the social channel.

If anyone has any questions pop onto IRC and chat to us there

Many many moons ago when I was in college and involved in Skynet, I set up the Skynet talks.  The idea behind them was Limerick was not Dublin. Dublin had all these big companies and developers up here and we should meet these people and hear what they are doing, also we should invite back past members of Skynet and see what they are up to.

This year I’m being invited back. I’m going to do the same titled talk I gave to the MSc students in DIT- To Ubuntu and Beyond where Individual participation can take you, but with different content, so I need to work on that this week. Also Mat Zimmerman has been asked over so looking forward to hearing him talk.  Skynet have also nicely asked a few other speakers to come along and make an afternoon of it.

Everyone is welcome to come along and we’ve created a wiki page for the event.

Ireland is a small country full of amazing talented people will some pretty good coding skills under the belts.  Problem is and this is just my opinion, we all work separately  in our own communities even though we could be all within a 5 mile radius.

Global Jam coming up next month got me thinking. Ubuntu Ireland has come on leaps and bounds in the last few months.  We’ve regular IRC meetings, meet ups events and groups end up going to events together. This is all great! But we still need help, we still have questions, that probably we ourselves cannot answer, so why not ask the great community. The IRISH COMMUNITY.

With that I’ve created Open Jam, a event where everyone is welcome to come along and work on their own projects side by side.  I’ve come up with a way where EVERYONE from all areas,PHP, Ubuntu, Debian, KDE, GNOME, Python, Ruby, alt.net and anyone who wants to come along to do so.

You can work on your projects, help folks if they have some questions, hack, logs bugs, documentation, translations, whatever you like the big thing being we get to do it together in one place.

It’s not a conference, unconference, and very different from my ossbarcamp. But what I thought we could do throughout the day would be run a series of lightning talk, where folks could stand up and give a 3 min presentation on what they were working on.

Again, this was just an idea, and maybe folks won’t be interested in this kind of thing, but it would be beneficial to us all to work together. I’m still sorting the venue out, but hope to have details next week. It will be in Dublin as well, this is where I am.

If you’ve any thoughts pop onto #ubuntu-ie  spread the word.  I’ve create a sign up page also, if you’re interested jot your name down.

Thanks to Lukas Blakk for putting together this great short clip from someone of the women who attended FOSDEM. I was rather shy as I have a loathing of cameras but felt it was a good thing to get out there. It would be great to get more of these clips done from events to highlight women attendees.

I’m pretty amazed at how well the clip has turned out, considering it’s a mixture of the questions all put together so we all answer the same question one after the other.

Thank you. Here’s the link to  Lukas Blakk  blog and video