Excitement Unlimited — Grace Hopper Conference 2016!
When I got to know that I would be attending Grace Hopper Conference this year, representing Intuit, I felt as excited as the kids (in the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) felt ,when they won the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. With the conference being less than a week away, my excitement has been growing exponentially. The reasons for me feeling thrilled are quite obvious.
As a woman in tech, it is a tremendous gift to be able to meet in person and listen to keynote talks by a gamut of inspiring speakers such as Ginni Rometty, Megan Smith, Latanya Sweeney amongst other 2016 speakers honorees. I am super excited to listen to their talks, learn about their journey and gain invaluable lessons for my future. In addition to the keynote talks, there is a splendid array of tech talks presented in the form of clusters — with each cluster containing groups of talks of similar topics.
The Career cluster encompasses professional development workshops and talks on transitioning between careers, exploring different paths in Technology, career growth, becoming a mentor, increasing your impact at work in addition to talks on getting recognized at work and negotiation skills for early and mid career women. The Emerging Tech/Best of cluster has interesting talks such as, Building your first Apple watch by Kristina Thai and talks on Internet of things , Cloud & wearables, new horizons in Artificial Intelligence, IoT deployments — The SmartCooler & Smart Dustbin. Quite an exciting set of talks here!
There are also going to be several talks under Open Source World cluster such as Transforming an Internal Tool to an Open Source Project and contributing to Open Source Software, in addition to the Open Source Day Code-a-thon for Humanity. Several sessions on Web Application Development such as a survey of frameworks and tools for web application hackathons, Demystifying modern Web Development by Komal Bhatia apart from talks on Mobile, Security, Machine Learning, VR, distributed systems and hardware, come under the Technology cluster. I am eager to also explore special sessions cluster that has talks on ABI.Local, Lean In Circles, Angel Investing for women and also screening of the movie She Started It.
The entire schedule has several more insightful talks, lunch meet such as Asian/Arab/Black/Latinas/LGBT-Q lunches and meetups. There is an endless number of amazing women to meet and exchange ideas with during these meetups, lunches and after parties and make friends with similar interests. Plus, there is also a chance to meet Telle Whitney at the ABI Booth!
Last year, it was a ‘dream come true’ moment for me when I met Telle Whitney, CEO and President of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and spoke to her about how inspiring the conference was for me. I also let her know how thrilled I was to meet my role model — Sheryl Sandberg, plenary speaker in fireside chat with Nora Denzel, at Grace Hopper Conference 2015.
This year, Grace Hopper Conference would be attended by 15,000 people, most of them being women. Intuit has several exciting talks lined up for the conference and our amazing speakers are prepared to inspire you with their talk. Make sure to not miss the talks on all three days!
If you are a security ninja or interested in securing applications you develop then definitely check out ‘Tech Node sponsored by Intuit’ presented by
Myoki Spencer of Intuit’s Cyber Security team and Shannon Lietz of DevSecOps Red Team. I hope to have a great time at Grace Hopper Conference 2016 and meet several of you at the conference. Come meet me at Intuit booth at the Conference.
Nithya Pari is a Software Engineer at Intuit where she works on Fullstack development of Intuit’s accounting software — QuickBooks. She is a member of Tech Women at Intuit where she served as a mentor in their Girls Who Code summer immersion program for school girls. Nithya graduated with a Masters in Computer Science from North Carolina State University (NCSU). At NCSU, She served as a WebMaster and Board member of the Women in Computer Science club during her final grad year. Nithya enjoys attending tech conferences and keeping herself in sync with the latest developments in Computer Science. Outside of work, she enjoys volunteering at animal shelters, hiking and nature photography. Follow her at @nithyapari
