Duchess
Globally Connecting Women in Java Technology

Devoxx day 2, 15.10 Room 5
Java Posse Live
Dick Wall, Carl Quinn, Tor Norbye and Joe Nuxoll

This semi-transcript can’t begin to describe how funny this was, so if you have some time: go and download it instead of reading this!

At the beginning of the session, after everyone had sat down with a beer (sponsored by Atlassian, the official beer partner of the posse), we got chimp rolled. (Two chimpansees on a Segway?) Then they announced that the next Java Posse Roundup will be from March 26th till 30th in Crested Butte, Colorado (USA).

As always the recording at Devoxx starts with a survey, which revealed that the Devoxx rock-star wrist bands aren’t very popular, but Belgian Beer and Waffles are.

After the survey, the posse members start getting really morbid and invent all kinds of reasons why they would need a successor. Then they randomly select five names from all the attendees who are visiting Devoxx and come up with Chet Haasse, Mark Reinhold, Brian Goetz, James Ward and Stephan Janssen. Out of curiosity they ask each randomly selected deputee why they came to Devoxx. Chet only came for the comfortable chairs, Mark for the excellent keynotes, Brian for the extra airmiles, James for the beer, and Stephan came because he had to, but would really prefer being at home.

In order to select the official deputee who might succeed one of the Posse members in case of an untimely demise, they hold a shootout at the Posse Corral to determine who is most fit.

The first round is rapid research. Every now and then the posse has some random question which needs to be answered. So each of the candidates must prove how well they can get an answer by any means possible.
1. How many companies were on the original expert group for JSR 273.
– Chet quickly comes up with the ever favorite 42.
– Stephan answers 17, but later changes it to 11
2. What is the number of languages currently available on the JVM?
– Chet: -5
– Mark: 239
– Brian: 278
– James: 60
– Stephan: 150+
Sadly, the true answer is unknown.
3. What was the first non-Java JVM language?
– Chet: English
– Stephen: JRuby
– Brian and James: Ben Hill(? I might have gotten that one wrong)
– Mark: Scheme
– audience: Oak
– posse: Byte code
4. What is the lifespan for a newly issued software patent?
– Chet: my lawyers won’t let me say
– Mark: too long
– Brian: de facto, 17 years
– James: zero in China
– Stephan: should be zero

The second round is the code challenge. An intricate piece of code is shown on the screen with a while loop, containing a printline statement followed by a return, but the finally writes another line to the console, followed by a continue. The question is what the output would be.
Stephan: it won’t compile due to tabs and braces
Chet: it throws a DumbCodeException
Mark (actually typed the code in Emacs and ran it): It prints Java\nPosse\nJava\nPosse…Java\nPosse infinitely
Mark is right.

The third round is acronyms. The deputees are shown a list of terms and are invited to turn one of them into an acronym to explain what it means.
Mark: BYTE; Big Yellow Type Error
James: JSR; Java Spec, Really?
Chett: SWING; Sun WIll Not Give-up
Stephan: JINI; Just an Interface (he appologizes for not having had enough time due to not being a native speaker)

The fourth round is wave forms. The posse would show a wave form of an actual bit of recording from the Java posse, and the deputees would have to pick the answer that said what the recording contained. I’ll spare you all the options, as I can’t show the wave forms anyway, but the answers were: “Soooo….”, “Nose blow”, “Hello and welcome to…”, “Ummm…” and “Whip crack”.

The fifth round is Fake news. [editor's note, I didn't take any notes of the things people said about these topics, so I'm doing this from memory. I hope I didn't mix the speakers up.] Chett talked about the session called “Intro to project Avacado”, which was some kind of project that had created software that had something to do with vegetables. Mark told about the session called “Hand-Optimizing Bytecode with BitClipper”. According to him it wasn’t a very good presentation as the presenter spent most of the time complaining about the horrible submission process of Devoxx and then talked about something to do with scissors and nail clippers. Brian copied this tactic when having to explain what “The next great JVM language: Socotra” was about. James had to talk about “The latest agile practice: Blame Driven Development” and said that it wasn’t his fault that the seats were so comfy that he didn’t get much of the presentation. Finally Stephan had to explain about “Project Anarchy: A new approach to parallel computing”. But he had left the session early to attend the panel about women in IT.

The sixth round is about the posse lingo, where the deputees had to show they knew what Leeroy Jenkins, Phasers on Stun, Quit playing with your dongle, and Do the count-in meant. (In case you are not Java Posse fans the answers are: “It’s time to start the show”, “Phones in airplane mode”, “Are you accidentally muted?” and “Sync the audio channels”)

The seventh round was about sound effects. The first effect was the standard opening sentence “Hello and welcome to…”. Chett had a coughing fit, Mark seemed to try using his most sexy voice, Brian was very cheery about it, James used a recording, and Stephan did a Flemish edition. The other effects were the Quick news whip, Listener feedback, Random crap and a Pirate yarrr.

The eight, and final round is Impossible names. Every now and then the posse is confronted with names that are truly impossible to pronounce, like John Smith, Freddy Guime, Herbert Czymontek, Romain Guy, Raghavan “Rags” Srinivas and Hugh Jass. The deputees try their best, but fail just as much as the posse does.

Then it’s up to the audience to vote on who the official deputee should be. As it’s a tie between Chett and Stephan, there is another impromptu round, the Fashion round. They both have to pick a color out of the four hats and show their most fashionably cowboy swagger. Stephan needs a bit of practice, whereas Chett shows his unguessed skills as a true fashion model. In the end, the posse determines that Stephan is the new honorary posse member and make him swear on the hat that he’ll keep up organizing Devoxx for as long as he can.

I went to Devoxx again this year, and made lots of notes of all the sessions I visited. At first I was planning to write one big summary of the event, like I usually do. But then there were some sessions that I nearly transcribed, so naturally those are pretty long. Also, I haven’t had time to make proper blog posts out of all my notes, but I didn’t want to wait until I was done with all of them. Here is the post of one of the sessions I visited that I have turned into a blog post.

Devoxx day 2, 14.00 Room 3
Why we shouldn’t target women
Martijn Verburg, Kim Ross, Régina ten Bruggencate, Trisha Gee, Antonio Goncalves and Claude Falguiére

With five minutes to go before the presentation the room is filling up quickly.

The panel introduces themselves and Martijn, the host, explains how they will run the panel. People in the audience can ask questions through Twitter by using the hashtag #devoxxwomen. Below is my transcription of the questions and summaries of the answers the panel gave. I didn’t attribute the answers to anyone, as they are too much my own interpretation of what was being said. (Seeing how I didn’t use a recorder to make the transcription. I merely wrote stuff down as fast as I could.)

“Why aren’t there more women in IT.”
– We’re the wrong persons to ask, as we’re already in IT. But our guess is that it differs from person to person.

“Is Duchess targeting universities to attract more women into IT?”
– We want to go looking for teachers, but we really need to target even younger girls, as there aren’t very many doing IT studies either. We really need to convince even younger girls and their parents that IT is an interesting carreer for women. But this will take a long-term investment that not many companies are willing to make (yet).

“Why the obsession with more women in IT?”
– What we really need is of course more diversity, not just more women. But the starting point of this panel is that this is already a given. It’s already been proven that diversity is a good thing for teams and companies. So we’ve chosen to make this a discussion about getting more diversity by trying to get more women. But we really should also try to get more black people and Asian people and all other minorities.

“Some industries are male-driven, some are women-driven. Would this be a cultural thing?”
– Yes it is. Countries like India, Brazil and Egypt already have more women in IT.

– The Paris JUG has a meeting every month with about 200 people. Afterwards, they go out to dinner. At first, there were only very few women showing up at these meetings. And none of these women joined the group for dinner. Then some girls who were active in the group, decided to have a women-only meeting before the official JUG-meeting. They’d get together and then went to the official meeting together. This has led to the number of female members in the Paris JUG to grow from 8 to 20 members, some of whom even join the group for dinner.
– But maybe we should do such a thing for all new members, and not just for the women. Because joining an existing group can be daunting for everyone, not just for women.

“How can we change the image of programmers sitting in a basement with lots of pizza boxes and coke cans around them?”
– It all starts in college where the nerdy guys scare of the girls.
– We’ve probably all fulfilled that image at some point (since most of us are geeks after all). But the industry itself isn’t like that at all.
– This image hurts us all (men as well as women), because as a man you’re expected to grow up and do something other than coding. While most of us are passionate about what we do, and don’t want to do anything else.

“What can conference organisers do to attract more women speakers?”
– Please, no positive discrimination. Positive discrimination hurts women, because it makes people doubt our credibility. ‘Are you in that position because you are actually good? Or are you just the token woman?’
– Speakers are usually chosen from a pool of known speakers, so if there aren’t any women in there, you won’t get any female speakers.
– Most selection committees are all men too, so it would probably be a good idea to get more diversity there too.
– Women put the barrier too high for themselves. They think they have to be really great before they can even submit a paper to speak at a conference. Don’t forget that there are a lot of crappy male speakers, and all you need is more practice.
– Mentoring is really important to build confidence. So look around you if you see anyone you think might be capable to speak at a conference and then try and guide them into it.
– The XPdays pair speakers. For new speakers they usually try to pair them with an experienced speaker.

“The language we use in job advertisements is rather aggressive. Is that a barrier?”
– Yes!
– We should push companies towards more mentoring and such things.
– Women should also learn to just try despite this barrier. Getting a rejection doesn’t mean you’re no good. Usually it just means you’re not the best match for that specific function.
– It’s also a fact that companies actually ARE looking for great people.
– It might also be the interview process that scares people off. Men tend to judge women differently, even if that is mostly not a conscious decision. Because they really are only human after all. In France, 40% of all couples meet at work.

– Give your daughter Lego to play with! And later on, maybe try to learn them to program.

“The rumor is that Facebook pays a 20% bonus to female developers.”
– This isn’t a solution either.
* Note of the editor: Although it might set of an inbalance I’ve heard of from a female HR manager. Women tend to ask for pay raises less often. Meaning they also get them less often, as HR managers only have so much money to satisfy their employees. People who ask for a raise more often tend to get them more often too,

“Lots of women fall into the role of mother/sister of the team. Is that something they do because they want to?”
– For some women this comes naturally
– Others hate it
– A man could fill this role just as well
– It should be more of a mentoring role
– And isn’t this actually a sign that the team lead isn’t doing a very good job of it?

“Men are often discriminated against when it comes to being a father.”
– Women won’t get equality at work, until men get equality at home. Until it becomes normal for men to share in all the responsibilities at home, women will keep being rejected for jobs as they might want to have kids.
– We really should separate the parents’ rights issue from the womens’ rights issue. It should become just as normal for a man to take time off to take care of sick kids.
– Maybe we should even have laws enforcing this.
– It is already happening. In lots of countries it’s becoming more and more normal for men to take time off to take care of the kids.

“Some companies are actually looking for senior women who are a mother, as they would have management skills.”
– Isn’t it strange how a mother is supposed to have these skills, but a father isn’t?

“Isn’t it true that women are overly sensitive to male banter and such?”
– If there had been more women in the industry, they would give as good as they got. But because there is such a huge inbalance, they can’t.
– Joking in the workplace is something entirely different from jokes in a public forum such as a presentation at a large conference. In the workplace you can joke back, in a public conference you can’t.
– Maybe we should do mentoring in bantering as well.

“Should we ban booth babes?”
– No, we really should have cute boy booth babes as well!
– We really would prefer technical people, as having booth babes really hurts the credibility of female techs who are trying to sell their product. And besides, the booths that have booth babes usually hamper their own success as well, as nobody is coming to hear about the product anymore, but merely come to ogle the eye candy.

“Can you give any advice for men with a younger female boss?”
– Just treat them as if they were an older male boss.

“Do you know that it’s different in Brazil?”
– Brazil is a new country, IT is also new and considered as a cool thing to do besides (and not a geeky/nerdy thing).

“Last year at Devoxx there was a 1% female attendance.”
– Free tickets wouldn’t help, as only 10-15% of all programmers in the UK are female, so there simply isn’t a very large pool to draw from.
– Duchess is trying to address this by organizing themselves around conferences and by announcing what conferences we’re attending, in order to lure more people over there.

“How many people know about the Java Champions program?”
* editors note: Not many people raise their hands at this question
– It’s a program to make the role models of the Java world more visible. They are a self-selecting group, who nominate people who have been very active in the Java community.

– As a closing note, targetting women specifically is narrowing the field and we really should aim at diversity in general. Not all women are the same, and assuming that they are will not work to attract them.

Women in Java: An Unconference

Date: Thursday, November 17, 2011
Time: 19:00 to 20:00
Location: Metropolis Antwerp

Join us for a Duchess Birds-of-a-Feather Session at Devoxx 2011.
Come and meet Anna Gos and Regina ten Bruggencate to discuss topics relevant to women in the Java world.
We will run this as an unconference, so bring your topics to discuss!

MEET US IN PARADISE
Devoxx celebrates it’s 10th anniversary! They have welcomed many attendees and speakers during this decade. They have seen startups grow up (many got acquired), enjoyed beers with peers but more importantly talked, shared and exchanged Java experiences with colleagues and friends in a passionate way. This edition will not be any different: another Java roller coaster ride!

Devoxx will be from November 14th till November 18th at the Metropolis in Antwerp, Belgium.

Register today and let us know if you are going to join us.

The program will be 2 days of university sessions, followed by 3 days of Conference sessions and BOFs.