On September 15th, the Women Who Tech telesummit occurred. Work has been pretty busy for me lately, so I had to take care of obligations there and couldn’t participate in the summit, maybe next year. However, I was able to go to attend the San Francisco after party, which was delightfully held just a couple of blocks from where I live. Upon arrival I was immediately glad I had taken the evening to come to the event, as I finally met Kirrily Roberts! I was shy as is typical, but in addition to Kirrily, I met one woman at the event who I’m working to meet up with again. I was also part of several interesting discussions about (predictably) the gender imbalance in tech, one of which discussed assumptions we all make about each other based on dress and demeanor, and how that impacts the reception of women within the tech world.
Later in the week I headed down the other way on 2nd street to an event that was even closer to home, down at the CBS Interactive building for a MySQL Meetup where Ronald Bradford was presenting on Successful MySQL Scalability. I’ll be honest, while I do my fair share of database administration as a sysadmin (yes, I see the DBAs reading this cringing in horror) I was half expecting the talk to be a completely over-my-head discussion about performance tuning and complicated MySQL replication strategies that go beyond the basics of replication and sharding that I’m familiar with. Instead, I was delighted to hear the presentation end up being a sysadmin’s dream! In his first point he was singing the praises of system monitoring and instrumentation from the beginning, in the second he spoke of how vital automated server deployment was, in his third he discusses disaster recovery (because disaster will happen!). From there he gets into other great points that I hadn’t really thought through doing the work I do as a sysadmin, like requiring developers to use an API for access to the database so that tests can be more easily written and the underlying database structure can be changed without expensive code changes, and from there asking questions about “what your site looks like when the database is down” – and how outages and maintenance windows can be handled more gracefully with segregation of data (r/o away from heavy r/w data, vital and non-vital, legacy and new data) and by keeping users informed (disabling certain features during maintenance, etc). Of course it wrapped up with more complicated discussions about caching and sharding. The slides are here.
Saturday I was able to make it out to the OLPC SF meeting in the morning to discuss the upcoming summit and then was able to thankfully use the rest of the afternoon for some much needed project work time. Tuesday evening of this past week was spent at a Bay Area LUG meeting where Martyn Collins of All-Access Law spoke on Linux Lawyers, which was a really great opportunity to hear about the adoption of Ubuntu by a self-professed “not very technical” person. He started using Ubuntu for his practice in October of 2009 with the purchase of a dual boot laptop, and following the 10.04 release he switched entirely to Ubuntu. His journey has primarily been one of searching through the Ubuntu Software Center for applications that would fit his needs for word processing, email, pdf manipulation (this one was huge!) and other things, I even learned about xournal from his presentation, a great little app that, among other things, allows for annotating pdfs. He was also very conscious about metadata on files, and discussed how great open formats were for the ability to strip some of this out. What I loved most about this presentation was the ability to ask the presenter all kinds of questions about what he thought about Ubuntu diving right in, is the software center good? Did you ever think “I’m just going to switch back to Windows!”? and are there any apps you wish you had? I was delighted to learn his responses were overwhelmingly positive and he’s completely sold on Ubuntu.
Now, you know what was particularly awesome about all these events? I walked to all of them. It’s really something to be living in a city – and such a tech heavy one at that. There was no where I could walk to from my old home, every trip was at least a 20 minute drive in my car, and frequently longer than that (45-60 to any of the LUG meetings I frequented).