With Great Anticipation!

I am on the edge of my seat with excitement about this year's Grace Hopper conference. The first time I went was in 1997 in San Jose. I was a recent graduate from Purdue University and enjoying my plunge into the tech market place. I'd always been involved in college with groups like Women in Computer Science and Women in the School of Science, but wasn't sure where to find the support that I was used to in the "real world". My mentor from Purdue, Barbara Clark, recommended I go to the 1997 conference - and wow, it was an eye opener! For reasons I cannot begin to even fathom, I somehow managed to miss all the next Grace Hopper conferences until last year's in Orlando FL. I have been missing out! I love the camaraderie, getting updates on fascinating technical topics, and learning about new job skills and job markets. This year I'll be a panelist on women in Open Source, as well as blogging. I'm a staff engineer at Sun Microsystems, currently still heavily involved with computer security and in particular the Solaris Cryptographic Framework project. You'll see me a lot on the opensolaris.org mailing aliases, and often making updates to the documentation for external (and internal) contributors. This is probably my last update on this particular blog, as I plan on doing the most editing on my own blog - just so I can keep it all in one place.

Valerie Fenwick