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Amusing Tidbits from DjangoCon 2008
* Lines for the Men's Room and no lines for the Ladies. This makes the ladies happy that the usual tables are turned.
* The loos' seats at Building 40 of the Googleplex are heated! I have never met a warmed toilet seat before. The lap of luxury, indeed.
* Speaking of ladies, out of 200 Con attendees there are over 20 of us here. Better ratios than the RailsEdge 2007 in Chicago or the Rich Web Experience that I dropped into last Sept in San Jose.
Go Django Go! Now go out and get more ladies involved in web dev!
* Speaking of male heavy tech conferences, the upside is that there is plenty of eye candy if you prefer the gents. Slightly geeky eye candy, but delightful nonetheless.
* Translating Deep Geek: In Java all the dense, insider only names for things seem to be about African large mammals and their lifeways. In Rails, they are just dense and opaque acronyms and some names reflecting birds and their lifeways. In Django the dense, insider naming conventions are jazz greats or musical references (Django, Satchmo, Banjo, etc). The question remains will Django branch naming out to the lifeways of jazz musicians (Touring, Heroin, Speakeasy, etc.)?
* The amusing part of the Googleplex is the large number of signs with RULES (emphasis on the EMPHATIC nature of the signs for information that normally should be common sense) printed on 8.5x11" white paper that are everywhere. Some examples:
"PLEASE No table tennis during tech talks" (The ping pong table has 3 signs on it and 1 next to it on a file cabinet)
"No Wire" (This sign is in blue with a white circle and line through it and it is next to a wireless router. Abstractly bizarre.)
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I almost called my Django-based CMS "Speakeasy", before I decided on "Savoy" (the name of a famous jazz venue). :)
very nice. =). great research into the the gender demographics. tres selling point!
:) It was pretty exciting seeing that many women there - now I really wish I'd pulled my head out of my laptop long enough to get to know some of us.
Jeff - Less famous to a national audience, but there is the whole set of clubs on Central Ave in LA during the 20s-40s that could lend to names.
Yeago - Yes, if one likes lots of men in one room, tech specific cons (like Django, Rails, Java, etc) are an excellent place to shop at.
Barbara - People seemed to be much more into the talks then networking, but it might have also been the space. But I agree with you that it was exciting to see women in the audience, not just for the numbers, but also for the comfortability factor. In the past when I have gone to cons that are 98% or more men, it gets uncomfortable to be there, as I feel like an exotic, strange beast on display. "Look, it is a female!" Today and yesterday at DjangoCon I felt normal. It was nice.