Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing just around the corner!

Wow, I can't believe we're less than two months away from hundreds (thousands?) of technical women converging in Tuscon AZ for the next Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference!

I'm excited to be moderating a panel on Women in Open Source and being an official blogger again this year. I've been looking at the schedule and it is full of interesting talks! This is one conference I really have to set my schedule up for in advance, because once I get there, it's a flurry of activity and I really don't want to miss out on anything! This will also be my first year twittering at the conference (as an aside, I can't believe it took me so long to get on Twitter - I'm learning so much, meeting interesting people, and it takes so much less time than Facebook or LinkedIn).

I'll be arriving Tuesday night to make sure I don't miss out on any of the activities on Wednesday. I wish I could take part in the resume clinic on Wednesday, but that seems to completely overlap with the Becoming a Person of Influence workshop, which I don't want to miss.

Speaking of resumes, I hear there's a "new format" for them - it's probably time I did a complete update of mine. I hear plain text versions no longer suffice. Hrm, perhaps even if I can't attend the clinic, I should still have one ready for women to give me feedback on them.

What are you looking forward to most?

This entry originally appeared on Valerie Fenwick's weblog.

Excitement builds for this year's Grace Hopper

Since tomorrow is your last chance to get the super early bird pricing of $500 for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, I thought I'd remind you by telling you just how much I'm looking forward to this year's conference!

This is my second time attending Grace Hopper. Last year, I travelled with the executive of our school (Carleton University)'s fairly new Women in Science and Engineering group, nicknamed CU-WISE. The opportunity to bond and team-build with the women I'd be working with over the next year was so invaluable, and I believe made a very big difference in helping us succeed. Indeed, the contacts we made, the outreach ideas we heard about, and the advice we received continue to make an impact today! Whether you are a student hoping to connect with other like-minded women in your field, or an employee of a company hoping to spend time with colleagues or meet new contacts, this is the place to do it!

This year, I will be again attending with this year's CU-WISE executive, but also with another special person. I am hoping to bring my husband (should all the finances work out), who is a computer science graduate and now a software developer. But this isn't just an opportunity for him to travel (he's only been on a plane once!), but he intends to participate in the conference, too! We're even both going to apply to volunteer as Hoppers, since that's the best way to meet people and truly feel a part of the conference. It excites me that he will be able to see what it's like being a minority in computing first hand, and bring back ideas and attitudes that will help inflict the change we hope to see in the cultures of schools and tech companies.

Finally, I have to say, the list of talks in this year's program is very intriguing. No matter where you're coming from - be it industry, grad school, college, or whatever - there will be something to interest you. There are even specific tracks laid out so you can find talks most relevant to you. But don't feel limited by that; there is something from every track that I want to see!

So I hope you will consider coming to this year's conference. Even the regular rate of $600 is well worth it, but you may as well take advantage of the discount if you can! (Note that students have until August 31 before their discounted rate of $250 expires for the regular rate of $270.) See you in Tucson!

Contributing to the Grace Hopper Bloggers Via Your Own Blog

If you've been watching the Grace Hopper Bloggers Blogroll (which is to the right of the main content on the actual website), you may have noticed that many contributers wrote posts from their personal blogs. Unfortunately, this means that all their posts show up there, not just the Grace Hopper ones. (I'm guilty of this, too - my posts from The Female Perspective of Computer Science are still showing up there!)

We're going to fix that for the 2009 edition of this wonderful conference. But don't worry - you can still post from your own blog if you want to. The trick is to carefully tag the relevant posts with ghc09 and import the RSS feed just for those tags into this blog.

If you use Blogger, you do this by adding a little bit extra to the end of your RSS feed. The format for the feed is as follows:

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/ghc09

If you use Wordpress, follow the tips from this page, where the following templates are provided:

• http://example.com/category/ghc09/feed/
• http://example.com/ghc09/feed/ (for WordPress blogs not using “category” in their permalinks)
• http://example.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=4

TypePad has a detailed article on how to do this in their Knowledge Base. Once you set up your template and create the appropriate xml file, you will be able to access your feed via:

http://example.typepad.com/my_weblog/categoryfeed.xml

If your blog has a custom setup, or isn't one of the three mentioned above, then you'll have to do some Google-fu to figure out how to set up your feed. If you get stuck, try leaving a comment, and hopefully someone will be able to help you out.