3 – Female high-school aged students (~18 or younger) can attend the next Girl Geek Dinner for free! If you know any who might be interested, please have them email us at organizers@girlgeekdinner.nl.
Wednesday 8 October was the third edition of the Girl Geek Dinner at the Flexbar in Amsterdam. Despite the short notice in announcing the event, there were approx. 30 girl geeks and a few male guests. Julie Lerman spoke about her years of experience as a woman in the world of computer programming. The story was not as technical as previous talks, but it was definately inspiring.
It all started for Lerman with the serendipidous discovery of a DBase-III book, that was left behind by someone else. Now, 25 years later, she is fluent in a score of programming languages. She is primarily self-taught as you can see from her biography and weblog.
Julie Lerman is an enthusiastic public speaker. She spoke for more than two hours about how she survives in the man’s world of ICT, and she explained how she accomplished it all. She provided a number of helpful tips like ‘participate in conferences and online communities’ and ‘try to become an expert in something’. At the end of her talk, she also provided a quick technical exploration of her area of expertise, the .NET Entity Framework. Interested parties can buy her book.
The discussion continued after Julie’s talk about the position of women in ICT, with the conclusion that women do stand out in the ICT crowd, but that it can be beneficial by drawing attention to our successes and accomplishments.
The next Girl Geek Dinner will be on 12 January 2009 in the Flexbar. The speaker will be Frances Brazier, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Keep an eye on our website for more information!
Abstract: Julie Lerman has been programming for over 20 years, with the glorious beginnings of a single BASIC computer class while acquiring a degree in Russian history. At her first job (nothing to do with history) the only computer in a company of over 1000 people quickly ended up on her desk. Since then she has used about 10 programming languages, but it took 13 years before she attended her first programming class. Julie will talk to the Amsterdam Girl Geeks about the challenge of trying to remain sane while keeping up with constantly changing technology and some of the extra challenges that being a girl geek added along the way.
Speaker Bio: Julie Lerman is an independent consultant and .NET Mentor who has been designing and writing software applications for over 20 years. Julie is the author of “Programming Entity Framework” (O’Reilly) and is well known in the .NET community as a Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider and INETA Speaker. She is a prolific blogger, a frequent presenter at conferences around the world and author of articles in many technical publications. Julie lives in the tiny U.S. state of Vermont where she runs the Vermont.NET User Group and serves on the board of the Vermont Software Developers Alliance. You can read Julie’s blog at www.thedatafarm.com/blog.
