Refreshment time

Okay, Day Two of the tech conference, and I noticed that the usual array of Coca-Cola products was augmented by Red Bulls, the first time I’ve ever seen that.

(Sorry about the focus; I have to Google what’s up with my P&S camera.)

The sponsoring company obviously knows their stakeholders. You’ll notice that the Red Bulls have been depleted, while the other stuff is still there.

Tech conferences: when not even Coke is caffeined enough.

Cyber exhaustion

I spent yesterday at a tech conference in the District They Call Columbia in which a whole lotta information was crammed into a very few hours. Everyone I spoke with commented on how intense it was.

How intense, you ask? Look at this guy:

The fact that I shot a blurry pic is reflective of how beat I was. And here’s the kicker: this was just before lunch. We all had concurrent tracks of talks and panel discussions from 1300 to 1830.

And more of the same today. Dang.

Somewhat beauty and poetry

It’s Ada Lovelace Day, the single day out of 365 that we devote to honoring women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. In the past, I’ve written about the architect Julia Morgan, engineer Beatrice Shilling, physicist Joan Strothers Curran, Nobel Laureate for physiology Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, computer scientist Grace Hopper, radio frequency pioneer Hedy Lamarr and chemist Marie M. Daly. Among others.

This year, I’m shooting for the stars. In particular, astronomer Maria Mitchell, whose Quaker family believed girls had the same right to pursue their passions as boys.

One of seven children, Mitchell was born on Nantucket Island in 1818. She started her own school at age 17, where she accepted any child, regardless of race or gender.

On 1 October, 1847, she discovered Comet 1847 VI, which came to be known as Miss Mitchell’s Comet. There were other female astronomers around, both in the US and Europe, but her discovery raised the stock of New World astronomy among scientists in the Old World. It also brought her celebrity, which she used as a platform to enable other women to pursue their dreams.

Although she didn’t hold a degree, in 1865 Mitchell was the first professor appointed to the faculty of astronomy at Vassar College. Under her leadership and through her inspiration, Vassar enrolled more mathematicians and astronomers than Harvard from 1865 to 1888. Her students and she began photographing sunspots in 1873, the first photos of the sun. This allowed her to explore the hypothesis that sunspots were cavities on the sun’s surface, not clouds. (As it turns out, they aren’t. They’re regions of lower surface temperature caused by magnetic field flux.)

Despite the international reputation that Mitchell brought to Vassar, the college paid her and a female colleague lower salaries than younger male professors. Mitchell and Alida Avery persuaded the administration to give them parity.

One of the things she said that resonates with me is, "We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry."

Mitchell retired from Vassar in 1888, and died a year later. She left a legacy of scientific achievement, intellectual curiosity and moral strength that everyone can admire.

Meeting the customers

My employer has a conference going on in the District They Call Columbia this week. Yesterday I spent nine hours with users, as we went through an exercise to find out what they think they need to do to protect their companies’ data. It was fascinating, and at least one guy took a red-eye from Seattle to spend yesterday and today giving his feedback in six such groups, and is flying back tomorrow; that’s how important he feels this stuff is.

Anyhow, by the time I got home—after a two-hour commute; thanks, Metro!—I basically took a shower, checked emails, swallowed a fistful of ibuprofen and went to bed.

So, for today, Imma just leave this pic I shot at Costco the Friday before I started my new job—which is to say, mid-September:

It’s relentless.

Gratitude Monday: welcome

As I begin week four of my new job, I’m deeply grateful that I landed so well. Not only is the work rewarding and the compensation good, but my colleagues continually amaze me with their welcoming approach to me joining the team.

Even the fringes of the team—I’ll be on a con call, and someone from a product management-adjacent group will IM me to welcome me. Also—he’ll keep working until way late his time (Amsterdam) to give me access to GitLab.

Two immediate colleagues scheduled one-hour calls in week two to outline things I’ll need to know to function efficiently. One, the technical program manager MG, confided something extraordinary: the team interviewed several candidates for my position. I, she said, was the only one whom all five people said was their first choice.

First—I was unanimously first choice! Second—she wanted me to know that. That’s just amazing.

She also said that she knew within 15 seconds of the group phone interview (I spoke with her and the two other PMs) that she’d love working with me.

A couple of times on team calls, when something’s been mentioned, MG has IMed me to give me context. Also, on one call we were discussing one of the software products that will eventually be mine. The expectation is that this needs tweaking for user experience to work until it can be replaced. I wanted to clarify:

Me: “So—we need to put in enough effort to keep it going as an interim, for…six…18 months?”

As my manager in our conference room was starting to nod in a funny way, MG in Dallas interjected.

MG: “[Bas Bleu]—just so you know, ‘interim’ here probably means 36 months.”

Me: “Okay, then.”

At the first overall business unit weekly update meeting, my manager introduced me to the group. At the end of the meeting, the SVP came over, introduced herself to me and arranged to set up a 30-minute meeting with her, a get-to-know-one-another meeting.

So, the last time in my career that a global SVP did that for a regular worker bee was…never.

I do not by any means imagine this was particular to me; I expect she does it for anyone who joins her team. But during our chat, she said some things that were directly for me.

One: because I have no background in cyber security, she urged me (using her own experience as example) to make use of the company’s tuition reimbursement benefit. I’ve never had a senior executive say, “Here—we have this money and you should use it all up.” But she was also saying that they want to invest in me, they want me to be successful, and they’re thinking long-term.

Secondly, she told me how JN, the hiring VP, explained to her the team’s choice of me to join them. She took a yellow stickie and drew a circle (red in the following diagrams).

“This represents the team’s skillset and expertise.”

Then she drew another circle, like this black one:

“This is how the second-place candidate’s skills and experience mapped to the team’s.”

Then she drew a different intersecting set of circles (mine in green):

“This is what you bring to the team.”

Well, blow me if that’s not true. That’s pretty much been the case in every job I’ve had, and so I’ve worked extra hard to “fit in”, to become “more like” my colleagues. But they recognized the delta, and they value it.

This past week, I ran into her in the corridor outside the ladies’ loo. She was evidently showing her parents around, and she stopped and introduced me to both of them. Later on they passed my desk and she noticed that the light overhead was not, well, lighted. (This is some kind of Thing—when I get in around 0700, the entire area is blazing with lights. Then throughout the day, the one over my desk dims to the point that it feels like a cocktail bar. I can see the computer monitor fine, but if I want to read anything hard copy, I have to go to the break room.) She made a point of getting me to put in a Facilities request, and said if I needed a brighter work area, I could use her office the rest of the week, as she’d be traveling.

With colleagues at every level of this organization taking the time and making the effort to bring me in, I have an extraordinarily huge number of things to be grateful for today.