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.

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.

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

Well I gave my first talk today to DIT Masters Students this morning. Early start on a Saturday morning, they have a day of Case studies and get in speakers once a month.  Great idea to get some first hand knowledge on topics rather than reading about them.

As I said it was my first talk, in the past I’ve always gotten someone else to give a presentation as I’m more the organiser behind it. This time I decided to bite the bullet and give a short talk.  It went well I think. Not knowing what our target audience views on the subject we asked a few questions to give us an idea of the level of knowledge on the subject. Again the students were masters students, it’s a managerial course aimed at Information Technology.

A show of hands  raised shows us a lot were working already in IT, and some as managers, others were doing it as a follow on course from their undergrad. None of them seemed to have had much if any experience in the Open Source field. Few said they had used Open Office and that was about it really.

There were four speakers including myself this morning, Patrick O’Connor and Paul O’Malley gave a talk on “Teach your boss to floss“, Breaking their talks down into two parts. They covered how their experience in the work place and working with SMEs is benefiting SMEs using Open Source in every day business.

Next up was Declan McGrath, who was talking about the “Relationships between the Open Source communities in Ireland“ in general, focusing on Ruby as he is a ruby developer.  He gave a quick demo to the students to show them how easy it was to set up.  I have to say I was rather impressed and something I will definitely follow up on.

Finally me! I spoke on “To Ubuntu and beyond: Where individual participation can take you“. I tried to explain how I got into Open Source. My involvement in it, the role I play and how there are many ways you can contribute. I used the example of a ladder, going from point A to point B. Some people in life take the direct route, know they are a developer and know what they want to do and how to achieve it.  I’m not that person, I know I love technology, I know I dislike coding to an extent, I want to contribute, I’m good at other things, so the path I take is not direct it’s a lattice I weave and go up and get to places find out more about things and work where I can in places I can make a small difference.  It’s my contribution.

I have to say I was a little disappointed in the lack of feedback and questions over all to the speakers.  There were only two questions posed that were then referenced by all speakers throughout.

Q: Why has Open Office not taken off as well as Microsoft Office?

Q: Even in large a company, managers are only trained in (proprietary )standard products/applications?

I’m not sure the answer to the first question.  Alan Bell found figures to show how some countries have adopted it.

But to the second statement, I guess to me I find some managers don’t look outside the box, look for alternatives, and are in their comfort zone. The idea of change is often feared from a mangers perspective and I also think they don’t want to deal with their co-workers after the change has been implemented. So for the quiet life they leave it as is.

I’m glad I did my short talk today, it’s given me a bit more courage to do it again, I left some Karmic CDs there and students did take them, so I hope at the next Ubuntu Hour people will come along with suggestions after trying it out, or if they need help, we can point them in the right direction.

I finally gave in after enough poking and have agreed to give a talk.  I was asked there over a week ago to give a short presentation to a group of Masters Students here in Dublin.  On further investigation, I realised it was a longer talking spot then I could ever fill so I asked 3 others would they like to take part.

Patrick O’ Connor and Paul O’Malley will be talking on ” How to teach your boss to Floss”

What is open source, why should you care about it and how can it be of use to you in your professional life?  This talk provides a high level introduction to Open Source software and some its benefits in an organisation. Geared for IT professionals this talk is in two parts, designed to enable you to “sell” the use of Open Source into your organisation and how to work with it once there.

Declan McGrath will talk on “How the different members of the Open Source Community Interact”

Declan is a Ruby Developer with Clavis Technolog.  Coordinator for ossdev-ireland & Ruby Ireland.  Also involved with Python Ireland, Dublin Alt.net.  CodeMongrel.com Podcast.

and finally me  ” To Ubuntu and beyond: Where individual participation can take you”

How I got involved in OSS, where I started, how I contribute and how you can to.  You don’t need to be a developer to participate, nor do you need to be a whiz on the computer, there is a community of helpers out there.

This is all new to me, ask me to help or organise back stage, and I’ll jump in two feet first and ask questions at some random point.  I used to work organising events in college dealing with students is much easier then talking to a quiet room full of strangers. I know I speak fast so when nervous I speak even faster, so I’m going t try giving short talks where with the aim to slow down talking and another way I can give back.

Finally I am curious though, how did you get into OSS, where has it take you, was it the role you expected, did you ever see the path you’ve taken as being an option?