The Pope-Snapchat Connection, Beyonce’s Lunch and The Ladies’ Room Queue: My First Tech Conference

I am a software developer and last Tuesday I attended my first ever tech conference.

The topic of the day was Neo4j, a graph database technology that I happen to have recently decided to use in my “MSc in Information and Web Technologies” capstone project. This is not a technology that is relevant to my job and, at almost £500 a ticket, GraphConnect Europe wasn’t really on my radar for just a personal project (not to mention I didn’t know it existed).

A week before the conference I received my semi-weekly Women Who Code London newsletter with an invitation. The organisation had 10 complimentary conference tickets for their members and I was lucky enough to snag one. Exciting! At first, I wasn’t sure what to expect but I knew I needed to use Neo4j soon and being stuck in a conference hall all day with its creators and maintainers definitely couldn’t hurt.

So I went.

The talks were good and the event as a whole was immensely helpful to my situation but here are a few things that, as a conference newbie, caught my attention.

The Good

The Doctor Is In

My first geek-out moment of the conference happened the night before the event. In the week between that serendipitous WWC email and the actual conference I was busy with school work, work work and, as a lovely cherry on top, moving to a new house. Naturally, the conference took a backseat and it wasn’t until about 16 hours prior that I finally got around to reading about it. What was the schedule like? What could I expect?

I looked at the talks that were lined up and started picking which would be the most helpful for me. There were three tracks and most of the sessions I attended were in the “Deep-Dive” track which was the most technical of all. I was there to learn to use the thing, after all. (The most eye catching of the talks was titled “Who cares what Beyonce ate for lunch?” but more on that later.) There was a brief mention, underneath the basic event information that was advertising a “Graph Clinic”.

Now, I don’t know what other tech conferences are like so maybe this is standard but my inner nerd did a flip when I read about the Graph Clinic. The conference would have “Neo4j experts on call to answer your graph database questions, and more.”

I was kicking myself.

Were my project started and further along I could have brought them all my problems to solve. Solutions straight from the source! It sounded like a great idea and I decided should go to them even if my queries were vague.

When I got there, the GraphClinic was all I had imagined. Front and centre in the main hall was a sectioned off area complete with high tables, easel pads for putting ideas on paper and members of the Neo4J staff milling about in lab coats to answer your questions. I knew when I saw it had to take advantage of the brain power there so I signed up.

I met with one of the developers and explained how my project was, in part, going to use their graph database to find links between articles on Wikipedia. A ‘six degrees of separation’ sort of thing.

“Of course we can do that!” he said and proceeded to show me a number of resources I could use to import my data, learn more about Neo4j and some examples of other projects that were doing similar things. The graph clinic was already so helpful.

“Let’s try it out!” he said, when he showed me a Wikipedia link visualisation tool someone he knew had built.

“Let’s pick two articles and see how they’re connected” he said as he typed in “The Pope” in the first box. There was a thinking silence as we were looking around the room trying to find the furthest thing from The Pope as the second article to really work the magic of the tool. Surely a country would be too easy for the machine, and a body part was too boring.

“Snapchat,” I said looking down at the apps on my phone screen. That would surely do the trick. Immediately the results came back: it turns out there are only 3 degrees of separation between the article for Pope and the article for Snapchat. How great is that?

(In case you were wondering, the wiki article for “Pope” has a link to the article for “Catholic Church sexual abuse cases” which in turn links to “Stanford University” which has the “Snapchat” link. Brilliant.)

I was sold on the technology, I had a whole list of new things to check out and learn about for my project that I would’ve never found on my own and a newfound belief that we are all more connected than we think. The Graph Clinic alone had made this day worth it.

The Bad

The Ladies’ Room Queue

Like any other “first,” I was both nervous and excited to get to my first tech conference. The only things I knew about conferences were from brief mentions in tech articles or blogs. I knew there would be loads of free coffee, I knew they had to feed us at some point (the mediocrity of the food was also subconsciously expected) and I knew that there would be a male heavy gender ratio because that’s just how tech conferences work (Yuck.) What I wasn’t expecting was just how skewed the ratio would really be.

My giddiness and I rode the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre lifts up to the 3rd floor to the large, open main hall where the free coffee lives and as I stepped out into the space the realisation hit me.

Dudes. Everywhere. It was all dudes.

I had a micro panic attack for about 6.5 seconds when I thought “Oh my god there are no women here.” At second 7 I spotted my first lady and was relieved to have representation but that first impression stuck with me. As I made my way to the far side of the room for my first of many cups of joe, I was constantly scanning for women. I can’t say with certainty what the actual ratio was but it felt as if there was a woman for every twenty or so men at this event. (Maybe more? Maybe less? I’m bad at estimating.)

The shock turned into hilarity after our first block of of talks ended about an hour and a half later and we had our first coffee break. Having already had some magic potion earlier, I made a dash to the ladies room.

Ladies are used to “dashing” to the bathroom at events because if you linger for even a minute you could be stuck in a queue for the duration of the break.

This time, dashing was unnecessary. I turned the corner to the bathroom hall and there it was: the MEN’s room queue coming out the door already over a dozen men deep, not a lady in sight. The ladies room door closed and alone. I walked in and there were two (!) women washing their hands.

“Did you see the men’s queue? This never happens! Now they know what it’s like” was the conversation I heard. I heard a version of it again in the stall and again at the sink. Every woman that walked in couldn’t help but comment and be perplexed that we were in some sort of upside down world. There were knowing smiles all around and even a few giggles. We might as well have been all high-fiving each other in there. “Yeah! No waiting! High five!”

Despite the solidarity that the men’s queue elicited, it was still so discouraging to have such an obvious gender gap at this event. It’s no secret that tech is a man’s world but I personally was living with an illusion of progress. Clearly there is still a long way to go in making tech more inclusive and I now have an even deeper appreciation for the “women in tech” networks and communities I am a part of like Women Hack for Non-Profits and Women Who Code. The support they provide is so important to get AND keep girls in tech (not to mention getting them to conferences!) and hopefully it will soon lead to queue equality.

One Last Thing

“Who cares what Beyonce ate for lunch?”

was the title of the last talk I attended before the main keynote. The talk was by New York data scientist, Dr. Alicia Powers. In it, she told us a bit about a personal project of hers in which she used Neo4j and the power of graphs to build a health and nutrition recommender system based on CDC data of what people eat. She walked us through why it is important to look at people with similar food tastes as a more effective recommendation source for dietary habits than, say, a celebrity diet like Beyonce’s 22-day organic, vegan, gluten-free meal plan.

Although this was a talk on graph databases and data science, Dr. Powers made us all look forward to it all day just by picking a catchy title. I didn’t even hesitate adding this talk to my agenda. Conference speakers, take note! It’s good to not be so serious all the time.

Interestingly, this talk had the highest female to male ratio I perceived during the event which is partly a result of the catchy, culturally relevant title and partly because having female speakers in the line-up says “women are welcome here.” Having awesome female speakers is a great way to draw in more women to these tech events and slowly inch closer to that bathroom queue balance I would love to see.

At the end of the day after 4.5 cups of coffee and a few bouts of tweeting, I had learned how to speed up my graph data queries, seen a sample of how to link Neo4j to my Javascript project, gotten personalised attention from the experts and learned about all the tech involved in organising and unraveling the Panama Papers (spoiler: they used Neo4j). I was exhausted. My feet hurt (there was definitely more standing than I expected) but the experience was incredible.

I survived my first tech conference and now I’m sure I can survive all the others.