What I learnt at Grace Hopper Celebration 2018?

Hitesh Seth

Hitesh Seth

Principal Architect

Published Oct 27, 2018

Practice you lot know Grace Hopper? Y'all should. I have been amazed by her contributions to the world of computing and sincerely believe that we, all technologists especially developers, owe our careers to pioneers like her.

If it'southward a good thought, go ahead and do information technology. It's much easier to repent than it is to get permission.

Concluding week, I was fortunate to attend the 2018 Grace Hopper Celebration in Houston, the earth's largest gathering of women in computing (~20,000!). This was my second time attending GHC and it was actually fulfilling. I am still radiating all wonderful energy from the conference and thought I would share a few primal takeaways from this prestigious effect.

The result started on really high notation with inspirational keynote by Padmasree Warrior. Her "we are on the Movement" keynote highlighted the dramatic technology transformations underway with several industries, with a special focus on the Car, who she called as the next big consumer engagement platform. In addition to talking virtually future and the ever-increasing bear upon of technology on our daily lives, she touched on career management.

Don't run from a chore, run to a chore.

This simple quote summed it all, calling out that best fourth dimension to switch careers is when you lot are first-class in information technology.

Jessica Mathews, truly stole the limelight of the briefing, when she jump-roped live on stage and harnessed the kinetic energy to light a bulb. If you weren't at GHC, yous should definitely scout the video of her talk. She was truly an authentic speaker, her story of how she got into computing was truly amazing and left me touched. Just wow! She had a number of simple letters in her talk that has stuck with me.

Being underestimated was the best matter that has happened to me.

My favorite role of the conference was and is always though, interacting with many students attending the conference. This is really why I love to become to GHC. I spoke with many young women, and was amazed with the stories of how they were fatigued to calculating, the courses they were taking, the range of projects they had had done in fairly advanced topics like machine learning, natural linguistic communication processing, human-centered design, etc. Even met a few students who had developed a adequately sophisticated, fully featured React Native application equally office of a grade projection!

While there were a few students who had individuals in their lives that inspired them to get into calculating earlier, I met several young women who were but introduced to the wonderful globe of programming in the first yr of their college life.

IMO, this is something I believe we all technologists can and should brand a large impact at. When we connect with our community, our friends and extended families, let'south get in a point to encourage kids, in particular girls to the wonderful world of programming.

Lets make information technology our personal drive to plough consumers of apps to makers of apps.

If you lot haven't been to GHC, you should definitely program to get. Learn a lot, share your own story, be inspired and inspire many young women in the world of computing.

See you @ GHC 19 (Oct i-4) in Orlando.

Others also viewed