If you weren’t there you missed a fun evening of socialising, information, robots, easter eggs and networking with girlgeeks! We had an inspiring line up of speakers and the venue provided by UTS was great.
Thank-you to our lovely sponsors Thoughtworks and UTS Women in Engineering & IT who made the evening possible.
We were also honoured to be welcomed to UTS by Professor Shirley Alexander, who is a girl geek we can all look up to.
Speakers (in order of appearance):
Professor Mary-Anne Williams talking about technology and robots.
About: Director of the Innovation and Technology Research Laboratory at UTS, and previously guest professor at USTC. Her interests lie in computational models for decision making, reasoning, belief revision and cognitive robotics.
Designing and engineering innovative technologies is empowering, exciting and fun. In order to enjoy the benefits new technologies offer, girls need to be players not spectators. They must create new concepts, think disruptively, engage in design, construct and build. Girls must lead!
Claudia Mikaelian talking about Easter Eggs.
About: Claudia aka blakkat loves Salsa dancing and cats. Used to fix computers of the Windows and Mac variety, and whilst waiting for a long time for the upgrades/or OS installs to install, she used to build and maintain UNIX/LINUX and Windows servers. Blakkat got bored and decided to make pretty websites and now is a happy (soon-to-be-married) web dev at Yahoo.
Easter Eggs: “A virtual Easter egg is an intentional hidden message, in-joke or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, computer program, web page”
Theresa Cunnington: Talking about Usability.
About: I’m hand-wavingly frothing-at-the-mouth passionate about user experience, and part of the point of this is that you really need to care about what you do. The joy you get from delivering something that makes people say, “Damn, that works perfectly for me!” is what it’s all about.
How usability and user experience cover all design and construction/development, no matter what the field. My favourite quote about usability came from a child–Building software without doing usability is like making a suit without measuring someone first. If humans are going to interact with it, you need to consider their needs.
Jodie Miners: Talking about WordPress.
About: Technical Business Analyst: Self confessed twitter addict and gadget lover. I specialise in both Web and Microsoft / Enterprise technologies. My background is in construction so I’m passionate about the use of technology in construction.
My talk will showcase how you can build your own online presence using WordPress with very little knowledge of CSS and PHP. I want to explain how easy it is to have a strong online brand presence with just a few simple tools, and with the great features of WordPress. Especially the fact that this can be done for just a few dollars, or even free.
Thank-you!
A massive thank you to our helpers and supporters:
All the Girl Geeks
Allison Carleton
Andrea Certeza
Bronwyn Holland
Candace Wong
Cathie McGinn
Claudia Mikaelian
Diane Cotterill
Georgi Knox
Jaine Fleetwood
Jodie Miners
Kate Carruthers
Kellie Scott
Laura Waibel
Lynne Hoad
Mark Cahill
Professor Mary-Anne Williams
Professor Peter Booth
Richard Raban
Theresa Cunnington
Theresa Dinh
Thomas Given-Wilson
ThoughtWorks
Trading Technologies
