Duchess

On December 10, 2008, Linda and I did a BOF at Devoxx. BOF came from the phrase Birds of a feather flock together. BOFs are perfect for gathering a group of people who care about a certain topic. At our BOF, about 30 women and a few guys gathered to hear about Duchess and to discuss the issues around women in IT. Due to the large volume of research that I wanted to share, we only had a short time for discussion. I would like to recap what we had talked about and perhaps continue the discussion here online. If we were to ever do this in the same format, I would like to keep the talk short to leave more time for discussion, and have a organized meet-up for dinner and drinks where we can continue the discussions in a more informal setting.

Introducing Duchess
First, Linda talked about how we started Duchess and why we, as female Java developers ourselves, would like to see more women as colleagues. As introduction, she told that Duchess is a community of female Java developers with over 100 members world-wide, created to support and promote women in the Java industry. We provide a platform for professional and social networking that allows our members to connect with each other. Our short term goals included organizing social outings, technical sessions, study groups, and discounts for events and courses. After coming back from Devoxx, we finally became a foundation, so we can better arrange our activities for our members. Our long term goals include establishing local branches world-wide, starting outreach programs to reach other women and girls and get them to become passionate about IT. We also need to reach out to existing organizations that promote women in IT to possibly collaborate with them on our similar goals. Here at Duchess, our policy is to make visible the successes and challenges involving women in IT. Hopefully, through our collective passion and effort, we can help to change the image of IT into a great career choice for women.

Encouraging Girls
Someone (please let us know who you are) mentioned the role of parents in showing girls the choices they have by not limiting them. From a US-based education website, I found some practical advice for encouraging girls in maths and sciences. This includes:

• Ability is Expandable – Teach students that the brain grows when they practice and learn new material.
• Prescriptive Feedback – Provide prescriptive, informational feedback on strategies and effort.
• Female Role Models – Show students female role models to counter gender stereotypes.
• Sparking Curiosity – Spark initial curiosity and foster long-term interest in math and science.
• Teaching Spatial Skills – Teach students spatial skills such as how to visualize and manipulate forms and shapes.

As far as I’m concerned, these ideas also apply to software development. Ability is definitely expandable as long as people are curious and willing to learn. Feedback is an essential part of modern development methodologies and are instrumental in motivating people. Female role models show us what is possible in our careers. The ability to think abstractly while being able to produce concrete results is essential to software development.

Women with Passion for IT
Next, a professor who teaches programming in Estonia (again please let us know who you are) mentioned that in her class, the girls are less passionate about programming than the boys and therefore, they are not as good as boys. Perhaps the question here is: Why are they not passionate about IT? This means to me to be a case of self-fulfilling prophecy. If they think they’re not as good, then they’ll be not as good. Although girls on average perform better than boys in math classes at all levels, girls are more likely to feel less confident about their answers on tests and often express doubt about their performance. So, it’s perception issue – self-perception, as well as perception of parents and teachers. Furthermore, stereotypes (even subconscious ones) have a great affect on performance. When girls were told before a test that boys were better in math, their test scores suffered. So, in my humble opinion, confidence is the key to passionate learning because confidence allows one to try new things and this can come from risking and failing in a safe environment. With positive feedback leading to a sense of accomplishment, passion can be built and nurtured.

I did get the feeling that not everyone who had something to say had a chance to speak at the BOF. So, please feel free to comment.

• Part 1: Challenges for Women Entering and Pursuing a Career in IT
• Part 2: Reasons Why More Women Should be in IT
• Part 3: Strategies to Tackle the Issues

• Climbing the Technical Ladder: Obstacles and Solutions for Mid-Level Women in Technology
• The Business Case for Gender Diversity
• The State of Women and Technology Fields Around the World
• Where are the Women in Information Technology?
• Why More Women Should Consider a Career in Computer Programming
• Women wanted in Europe’s ICT industry
• Promoting ICT Among Young Women in Europe
• Women Employed in Science and Technology
• Women Matter: Gender Diversity, a Corporate Performance Driver
• Women holding purse strings
• Best Buy gets in touch with its feminine side
• Men Write Code From Mars, Women Write More Helpful Code From Venus

As I mentioned in my own blog-post I’am the lucky one who won the free devoxx tickets, Yay! I also wrote in the same post:

I’am a bit behind on the recap though

I made lots of notes and decided to write some posts about the most interesting session I attended, this will include:
XP loops, Seam in Action, Test driven development and PHP on Java.

At University day 1, I attended the session: Scrum in Practice by Chery Sylvain and Yves Hanoulle.
This session was divided in two parts, XP Loops and SCRUM.

You can read my recap about XP Loops here.

One of the most entertaining talks I went to was the Be smart! by Ivar Jacobson. Although the concepts that he presented were definitely not new, he found a very clear and entertaining way to present them. A RUP guy, he told it how it is – about what I consider to be agile – while calling it not agile – but smart.

According to Ivar, here are a list of things that we don’t learn in school:
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At Devoxx 2008 I got to hear about new stuff and meet new people – everything I expected from the biggest independent Java conference in the world. From what I hear, it is a conference with more stuff and less fluff – even said by Sun employees in comparison with JavaOne. It is big enough so that you can move around between talks in the same slot and if you’re not going to talks, there are always other people to hang out with. Topics that are discussed at Devoxx usually become mainstream within a year or two in the Netherlands. Perhaps they become mainstream sooner in other countries. Devoxx is always interesting for consultants such as myself to keep track of the latest trend. Not everything however, become mainstream or relevant, so the trick is to pick out the right topics to dive into later.

Here are some highlights from Devoxx 2008:
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Today was a short day. I only visited two out of three sessions, as I didn’t see anything interesting in the third slot. The first presentation was on ActionScript for Java Developers by James Ward and Chet Haase, where they showed us how alike ActionScript was to Java and what the differences were. Very well done.

The second presentation was by Simon Ritter who had once again indulged in some woodworks to create a beautiful demo of a multi-touch screen with JavaFX. He easily filled up the entire hour by explaining the steps he had taken to create it, so we could all make one for ourselves.

And then it was time to get some chocolate and head for home again.

A one-line summary of all of Devoxx? If you haven’t been there yet: do so! You’ve really missed out on the wonderful presentations, both educating and entertaining, and also on the wonderful atmosphere.

Today I took it easy. Due to going to bed late last night I was rather tired, so I decided to add some fun sessions. (As opposed to picking the sessions based on potential usefulness.)

I started off with the keynote sessions. As my mother always taught me that ‘by night a man, by day a man’. Which is of course in my case a woman, but most expressions don’t take that into account. The first keynote was Effective Java Reloaded by Joshua Bloch. This session contained some of the items that he has described in the newly released 2nd edition of Effective Java. And I’m very happy to say that we will have this book as part of our Duchess library. So as soon as I have finished both the book and the library application it wil be rotating among our members. (Those that show up at the meetings anyway.)

The second keynote was a Java 7 update by Mark Reinhold. Or at least that’s what the program said. But Devoxx being an Agile conference, the subject got partially changed as they have just announced that project JigSaw will be included in Java 7. Project JigSaw is the project that will cut Java up into modules, so the JDK won’t have to be so large anymore. After discussing that he did give us a short overview of some features that will go into Java 7, but I advise you to go visit his blog for those. Afterwards Stephan pointed out to us that we could prioritize some of the small language changes they are considering and that we would be taking seriously if 100 people or more would vote on them. I’m not sure that there were a 100 people who had scribbled their votes on the board by the end of the day, but if there weren’t  than it was only because the board was full and no more votes could be put onto it.

My first regular session was by Jonas Jacobi and John R. Fallows about HTML 5 and some of the features that will go into it when it will finally come out and how those features were already being implemented by browsers today. (And how Kaazing had already emulated them with their Kaazing Gateway, although this really was only in the last 15 minutes.) The features discussed were WebSockets (full duplex text communication), cross document messages, server-sent events, and one other item that I can’t remember. Very cool stuff!

My second session was “Don’t do it – common performance antipatterns” by Alois Reitbauer. A good presentation about some reasons why performance so often fails. The reasons were grouped into three categories: conceptual, organizational and technical. Reasons like people don’t want to overoptimize and therefore don’t think about performance at all (conceptual). People leave the pain until they feel it, leaving no time and budget to fix the performance problems until it is too late (organizational). Or there is nobody actually responsible for taking care of performance, so nobody is even testing for it because they all think somebody else will do that (technical).

Then I went to see the Javaposse. I didn’t have one of the Atlassian sponsored beers (as I was quite sleepy enough as it was), but I did enjoy myself immensely. And just like last year I want to find a way to listen to their podcasts. But probably, also like last year, I won’t find the time for it. Podcasts are just not something in my daily or weekly schedule.

Then there was the session about connectivity with OpenMQ by Linda Schneider. She started of with a lot of definitions of the concepts you need for messaging. Then she stressed that you have to think closely about how much performance you really need, as you usually don’t really need the five nines. And most certainly can’t afford it if you don’t really need it. Finally she showed some architectures that she had built.

And my final presentation of the day was about the next version of Parleys.com. After last year’s demo of Parleys v2, which was built with Adobe Flex and Air a lot of people felt compelled to try to build it with other techniques. Like JavaFX and the GWT for example. So they built it to prove that it could be done and showed the demos this year. There was also a demo of Parleys on the IPhone. All of those were very cool. But then came the really cool stuff: Parleys Publisher. A tool that will make the lives of Stephan and Valerie a whole lot easier, because up until now they had converted all those presentations on Parleys by hand. (Which was about 4 to 8 hours of work for a one hour video.) Once publisher is finished, it will take about twenty minutes or so to do it automatically. And that will allow us, the community, to join in and add even more content. So I’m really looking forward to that.

I didn’t attend the movie or any of the BOF’s, because by that time I was really tired. I really should have gone to bed sooner. Oh well, but at least this is the first year that I actually finished my recap. (Not that it is finished, I still have tomorrow to go. But I’m planning to only attend two meetings, so I have no doubt that I will finish it.)

Oh, and I handed out my last button today. So there were at least a hundred women at Devoxx!

Day 3, the first day of conference sessions. A schedule loaded with interesting presentations, offering lots of hard choices.

First of all there was the keynote. Since we were there early we managed to make it into the actual keynote room. Stephan once again proudly gave some stats about Devoxx, and rightly so, cause it really is something to be proud about. 3200 people, 6 conference rooms and 160 speakers. Then he introduced RoxorLoops who introduced us to beatboxing. I’d heard about it before of course, but I had never seen an actual beatboxing performance. And I was totally overwhelmed. I never believed that that guy from police academy could actually make all those sounds, but after seeing RoxorLoops perform, it’s suddenly a bit less hard to believe. I heard him actually make three different kinds of noises at the same time and he really, really sounded like a drumset with special effects mixed in.

Then came a keynote by Sun about the top ten of great on why JavaFX is great (presented by Danny Coward). And it really did look great. Flashy demos on films split into puzzle pieces with the individual pieces moving, a plugin for Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to create animations that you can use in FX, a multi-media cloud that you could access from both a desktop and your mobile phone, and probably one or two that I can’t remember right now. (It’s past midnight, so I have an excuse other than my lousy memory.)

Third was a keynote by IBM on the RFID tags that they put on our entrance badges and how they were being used to track which sessions were popular and which sessions sent people running out again. And also to make our life easier at some of the booths by just scanning our tags instead of having us fill in forms. Of course there are still plenty of forms left to fill in, but still… (One of the presenters was Robin Mulkers)

After the break that followed I went to a presentation about Hippo CMS by Arjé Cahn. A cool content management system that I need to check out as well. Not only do they offer a CMS complete with front end admin tool and repository, they also offer a portal application. And they also have something called facets, where you can define search queries on certain aspects of your content. They compared it to the CNet site and how you can search their reviews on vendors and price and the like. (And where you can also see how many results are in each category.)

Next was a presentation about DataPower by Bill Hines from IBM. It was a hardware solution to security issues with XML. It’s a nice product, but basically a sales pitch. Even if it was given by a technical guy who claimed that it wasn’t. I understand that he loves the product, and there’s nothing wrong with a sales pitch, all presenters do it basically. (Even if they are ’selling’ OpenSource.) But it just rubs me the wrong way when you claim that it’s not a sales pitch, just because you’re not a marketing guy.

The fourth of the parallel sessions I followed was about EasyB by John Ferguson Smart. Yet another cool tool that I really need to look into. I might be on the bench for the next few weeks, but I think I’m going to be a lot more busy than I would have been on an assigment! It’s a tool where you can specify your requirements in natural language and then implement them in Groovy.

My final session of the day was a presentation by Dmitry Jemerov and Ilya Sergey about IntelliJ Idea and how they had integrated support for Python, Scala, Groovy and Ruby. The demo’s were cool, though parts of the presentation were a bit hard to follow due to accent and the speed of talking. I can’t wait to play around with Idea. It’s already on my desktop, I just haven’t had a chance to play with it yet.

Then I met up with Clara to discuss the last bits of our presentation and to wait in line for the French fries. Unfortunately those were half an hour later than was in the program, but I was still in time for the Juglead BOF.

Which was in turn followed by our own BOF. It went pretty well. We even had at least 30 women in the room and also a couple of men. Clara’s part of the presentation had grown a bit since the last time we gave the presentation so we didn’t have much time left for discussion. Of course that was also due to the usual technical problems of hooking up a laptop to a beamer. In the end we borrowed Stephan’s laptop, because he did know how to hook that one up. So thank you Stephan, and also for having us! If you were there, please give us some feedback on what you thought of the presentation. We’re ever trying to improve it.

Day two at Devoxx was another university sessions day.

I started off with a presentation about Seam by Dan Allen. It was a good presentation on a nice tool. Unfortunately it is in essence a tool about integrating JSF with EJB’s. It does a lot more too, but that was still the main topic of discussion. I really liked the part where you can ultimately just plug in any persistence tool or system and any state tool or system and Seam just taking care of it. But JSF and EJB’s are not all that interesting to me at this moment. Also I had arrived late, so I really had to go to the toilet and the break just got postponed and postponed, so in the end I just walked out and didn’t come back.

Lunch was a pasta salad with tuna. I really don’t know why they said it was a shrimp salad, there were about three shrimps in it. It tasted good, but I think a lot of people were hungry halfway through the afternoon. But then they had more salad and also some slight variations on the tuna-theme.

After lunch I went to a session about Glassfish. Or rather several short talks pushed into one long university session. They talked about Glassfish v3 Prelude for a while (Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine), and then talked about project Fuji (the next generation of OpenESB), OpenMQ, Jersey which is an implementation of JAX-RS (Paul Sandoz), Grizzly Comet (Jean-Francois Arcand) and WebSynergy which is a webportal tool (Satya Ranjan). This is no longer in the right order, cause I can’t quite remember what the order was. Andreas Egloff talked about Fuji. Fuji sounded nice and the graphical tool they had developed for putting together the applications looks a lot like what I have in mind for letting kids build applications on the SunSpot. You could just drag components onto a palet and then connect them. So maybe I could use Fuji as a starting place and simply define leds and sensors as Fuji components.  Linda Schneider gave a short presentation about OpenMQ. Her laptop wouldn’t connect with the beamer, so the first half of her presentation was without slides. I was very impressed with how she handled that. Many people wouldn’t have been able to cope. For Jersey it took me most of the presentation to remember that JAX-RS was about web services. Of course _now_ I see that it was in the program, but it would have still been nice to have heard it in the first sentence. From the Grizzly Comet I only remember the explanation about how Comet has two other mechanisms beside the standard request/reply of HTTP. They had a delayed reply (letting the browser think that it’s a slow server) and a streaming reply (sending the answer in several partial replies). WebSynergy isn’t out in a final version yet, but it sounded very cool and I’m definitely going to look into it.

My third session was about Benerator by Volker Bergmann, a tool for creating performance test data. A truly awesome tool that could generate lots of test data from a database schema or even obfuscate production data.

And the final presentation was by Xavier Hanin about Apache Ivy, a dependency management tool. This tool looked very nice as well. You can plug it into your IDE and then create an IFL file where you tell it which projects your project depends on. In combination with a Maven repository it will then even download those projects for you as libraries, including all the projects those projects need. It can also checkthe inconsistencies in your dependencies, where you can specify which version you need and even that any version from a certain version up will do.

The first session I attended was The Scala Experience by Bill Venners and Ted Neward. In three hours they showed us a lot of the stuff you can do in Scala. Scala is a combination of imperative programming, like we are used with Java, and functional programming. It is strongly typed, but does use type inference. So it allows for code that is a lot more concise than Java. Later on in the week they’ll also give a shorter presentation with an overview of Scala, and I haven’t read the program yet, but I might visit that as well.

Then it was time for lunch. Lunch was a nice sandwich with a cup of pea soup. I have never before seen pea soup that was that thin. But it tasted good once you got over the unusual texture. Upstairs I met Aaron Houston from Sun. We talked for a bit and he asked me if Duchess had already gotten a SunSpot. When I said that we didn’t he gave me one on the spot. So now we really need to come up with cool projects for it!

The second university session was Java Power Tools by John Ferguson Smart. He gave a lot of demos from his own development suite. For some people it might have been nothing new, but for people like me who have never gotten the opportunity to work with all the cool toys it really was very interesting to learn how it could work. He showed samples from mainly Maven2 (building the application) and Hudson (continuous integration). But he also talked about and showed some Bamboo, test tools like PMD, CheckStyle and Cobertura. So he gave me a lot of ideas to try out and investigate.

After the university sessions there were some short (half hour) presentations about Tools in Action. The first one I visited was about Hibernate Search by Emmanuel Bernard from JBoss. I had met him before at the JBoss UG meeting earlier this year. He gave some nice examples about full text search, and also combined with stemming and n-grams. Very useful and I think I will definitely investigate Hibernate Search and Lucene.

My last session of the day was about 10 reasons why Java EE development doesn’t have to be painful by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine. I can’t remember all of them anymore, but the summary was that we’re not in 2002 anymore. I do still remember the first reason, which was that there are good application servers out there now that support Java EE 5.

Finally during the day I met lots of new women. I handed out at least ten of our shiny new buttons. So hopefully we’ll get an influx of new women soon. I met at least one lady from France, one from Estonia, and two from Russia.

http://www.javoxx.org/display/JV08/Home

JavaPolis? Javoxx? Devoxx! Does it need any more explanation? It’s the largest Java Convention in Europe. Two days of university sessions, three days of conference. The biggest hotshots of the community come to either talk or just sniff around. And you can be there as well.

Duchess (i.e. Clara and Linda) will probably give a BOF there.