Girls just wanna compute

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) is the Coachella of women in tech. For three days in October, it is the place to join together as a legion of the XX-chromosome set to talk software (and, to some degree, hardware, but mostly software, since Grace Hopper is the mother of computing languages), to network and to be recruited to high-paying software development jobs. (At least, if you’re finishing up your university studies, or a recent grad.)

This year, I’m joining 17,999 of these women (and some men) in Orlando the first week in October, and I already have the Mother of All Spreadsheets trying to map out the sessions I really want to attend, in rank order, since there are multiple tracks running, and in at least one time slot I have 11 sessions on my wanna-see list.

I have to say that, for being the pre-eminent women-in-computing gathering (put on by the Anita Borg Institute (ABI), no slouch in the field), their conference registration process was…not to put too fine a point upon it, lame. The day general registration opened in July, the server behind the web site couldn’t handle the demand, and the whole day was a series of anguished tweets from women around the world trying to give their credit card details only to have the page freeze or crash. And all GHC support could do was tweet instructions to keep refreshing. There were would-be registrants refreshing the page for hours.

That to the contrary notwithstanding, even with 18,000 paid attendees, there were bound to be people left without a ticket. ABI/GHC understands that, and ticket holders had until 15 September, last Friday, to transfer their ticket(s) to someone else. After that, anyone showing up at the Orange County Conference Center to claim admission on someone else’s ticket is SOL. After all, there are any number of elements to associate with the name on the ticket, and the Celebration has a soft launch on 3 October.

So Twitter, the various Slack channels and the Facebook group were filled with plaintive requests for someone to sell their ticket, even offering to pay more than face value, which is against GHC rules. (At one point, someone on Reddit announced that, due to “changed family circumstances” s/he needed to sell a ticket to the highest bidder. Don’t know what came of that, since the posting was withdrawn after it became known on Slack.)

I thought the requests would dissipate after the deadline, but I was wrong. Viz., this series of posts on the Facebook group yesterday:

I do not know what it says about women in tech that they either can’t read the rules, or think they don’t apply to them, personally. To build good software, you need to be able to listen and work well with your team; if you want to be a cowboy, you’d better be a real coding star.

Or, maybe it says that tech is their place, after all.