So last night we had the first MXUG-style Girl Geek Dinner. (“MXUG-style” = 15 minute talks on a variety of topics. Kind of like a compressed BarCamp.) It was really fun! We had about 11 or 12 women attend, and while I was stressing that people would be no-shows, that was actually a really good size. Big enough not to be awkward but small enough we could still talk as a single group. There was lots of great discussion.
We had three talks – Duana on distributed version control, using Mercurial as an example, me on “the right level of detail” (see slides below), and Jessica with “what has #AmazonFAIL taught us?”. (AmazonFAIL seems a topic that is due a good retrospective – see Metafilter, Neil Gaiman and Clay Shirky for some perspectives. She also mentioned the recent Amazon Kindle/1984 item, which is kind of sequel to the original AmazonFAIL, at least on a PR front.) And Andrea also did a lightning talk on how cool the Acer Linux netbook is. :)
You can find the code for the two things I mention – they are both on Launchpad. mwfeeds (demo at mwfeeds.modernthings.org) and the embryonic beginnings of what will eventually become something called mwsummary, if I get around to it.
Thanks to Duana my co-organiser, and thanks to everyone who showed up. :) We kicked around some ideas about future events, and it looks like we will have one on Sunday 9th August.
