I'm Geeky, She's Geeky, We're All Geeky

I spent this weekend at the She's Geeky conference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. The event was recommended to me by Anca Mosoiu, the owner of Tech Limnal.

The She's Geeky conference is an 'unconference', as such, you never really know what you're going to find until you've found it. Each morning volunteers from the participants wrote topics they'd be willing to teach, discussions they'd be willing to facilitate, or questions they wanted answers for on sheets of paper, and then used a large wall space to schedule them into the available time slots and session locations.

I originally thought the (un)conference principals posted on the wall were common to all unconferences, but I have been unable to find the list on either unconference.net, shesgeeky.org, or the wikipedia entry on unconferences (and the linked entries on different methods of facilitating them). So I'm going to try to drag them out of my memory and hope someone will come along and give me corrections and/or a reference. In any case, these principals made the event one of the least stressful events I've ever attended.

• Whomever shows up are just the right people.
• The session starts when it starts and ends when it ends.
• If you aren't either learning or contributing to the conversation, it is your responsibility to go somewhere where you will.
• Butterflies and Bumblebees are encouraged to flit from session to session contributing to each and cross pollenating between them.
• Others...

Over the course of the weekend, I attended the following workshops (names may be abbreviated / combined):

• Behavioral Interviewing (Lab126 flavored)
• Personal Data Ecosystems
• Wordpress
• Open Organizations
• Data Visualization
• Quantified Self
• Technical Interviewing (Google flavored)
• Django, APIs
• Online Learning
• Recruiter Wisdom (Groupon flavored)
• Mentoring
• Uncomfortable Personalities at Work
• Impostor Syndrome

My big take-aways from the conference are the following:

A framework for practicing for interviews that doesn't involve me trying to be something I'm not.

A hardware-y project (that I don't feel comfortable making public yet).

A project that is a cross between things I know I need to do for self care, quantified self, data visualization, and programming, that may lead to a commercial product.

A plan to learn math at Khan Academy, from wherever I'm currently at up through at least statistics, so that I can stop being limited in my educational choices by lack of prerequisites.

and

5 questions to ask people who ask me to be their mentor

• Where do you want to go?
• Where are you now?
• What challenges / obstacles are in the way?
• What have you tried so far?
• How much time commitment are you looking for?

I plan to encourage other women in my network to attend She's Geeky next year. I was not the only one who arrived overwhelmed and anxious and left inspired, enthusiastic, and refreshed. If you're in Seattle, you're female (I suspect those who identify as female would be welcome as well), and you are any kind of geek, there's a She's Geeky scheduled there in late April, don't miss it!