After Girl Geek Dinner #5

Finally, I have done my Girl Power talk in the Girl Geek Dinner. Yes, my usual way of presentation, i.e. all I have prepared were my slides. No notes, no plan, cannot remember what slides I have, and no idea what I am going to speak next. All I had was the power point presentation I created in an hour or two. I always think this is the best way for presentation, hope people think it did go okay.

Not that I didn't want to spend more time on the presentation though, it's just because I was so busy these two weeks. Well, although I am saying that I was busy, however I am still working 40 hours week, which comparing to Amanda's 70-80 hours week I should have no complain. The problem about me is I have to sleep a lot. Saying "A lot", I do means "A LOT", usually 8.5 - 10 hours a night. Hubby said I sleep more than a pig.

Look forward to the GGD on Tech Ed's Monday night!

Auckland Girl Geek Dinner 28th August 2008

Maybe a little bit too brave, but I am going to speak for 30 mins in the upcoming Auckland Girl Geek Dinner (see http://girlgeekdinners.co.nz/, although what am I going to speak is not up there yet). As you may already discovered, I like listening to other people techie talks, but myself don't like to do techie talk. Therefore, I am not doing one of those about REST, Silverlights, WPF, SQL Server 2008, AJAX, LINQ, Flash (oops, not MS!), Visual Studio 2008, TFS... etc hardcore stuff. Instead, I am going to do some relaxing thing, and my topic is "Girl Power! Why the world need us".

Well, this industry is for sure a male-dominant one, see last week in the .NET User Group for evidence. Yes we had 72 people, but in these 72, we have 3 girls from Olympic Software (my company), 2 from Kiwiplan (both are java developers, one was the speaker's wife and one was the girlfriend of a guy from Olympic), and 1 from the Software Engineering department of the University of Auckland. 6 girls among 72 people, that's 8.33333333333333%. Therefore, I am going to talk about why we need more girls in this industry, and as so-called* girl geeks, how can we make the difference in our work environment as well as the community.

Many people may probably think this is not important at all, but I tell you, Na! Come along and you will know. If you are a guy and would like to come, same old rule, you need to be invited by a girl! :D

Auckland Code Camp 2008

Hello guys and girls, yes! Code Camp is here again! If you came last year you'd know how good it is, and I have to tell you that this year it is even better! This year code camp is going to be more relaxed, which suits my personality very well, ha ha. Anyway. you can register at http://codecamp.net.nz and you have to be quick because we have over 200 registration already!

Date: 31st August 2008

Time: 9:00am - 6:00pm

Venue: Crown Plaza Hotel in Auckland (just next door to Tech Ed)

Cost: Free! Lunch will be provided by our sponsors. The after-match function is an optional dinner to be held at a restaurant within walking distance of the Crowne Plaza. Cost of the dinner will be less than $30.

Agenda:

We are close to finalising the sessions. Speaker details and a full agenda will be available shortly.

Sessions for the day will be:

• Thinking in WPF
• Silverlight for developers
• WCF
• ASP.NET MVC
• Real world TDD: Building Dependable Code with Dependency Injection
• As well as a bunch of Lightning Talks showcasing projects, products, companies and people in New Zealand

The day will run from 9am till 6pm, with a lunch and afternoon tea provided by the generous support of our sponsors (Datacom, Olympic Software, Intergen, Microsoft MVP).

Plan to stay until 6pm, as we're gathering up prizes to give away at the end of the day.

In fact, plan to stay the night, as we'll be going out for dinner afterwards.

So Register Here: HTTP://CODECAMP.NET.NZ

Post - .NET User Group 9 - Building line of business applications with Silverlight

Last Thursday we had our 9th .NET User Group meeting. Guess what, we got 72 people in total! It's very impressive. Darryl thought it is the biggest single user group he ever heard of in New Zealand .NET community. I think it's probably the case. Honestly we cannot fit anymore people in the room so in the future if we have a bigger number, we will have to do it in our warehouse. Good to see this number of people turned up. :)

Rob has put up the slides and the source code on his blog. Take them and play around with it!