My first Grace Hopper Celebrations vGHC’20
With just 88 days remaining for this year to end, I got a fantastic opportunity to attend the world’s largest gathering of women technologists — Grace Hopper Celebrations 2020 or vGHC this year. This was my first time attending this conference with my fellow 39,000 attendees.
Due to the pandemic, this year, the celebrations were held virtually.
In these uncertain times, this conference was a great triumph as it started with talking about our duties as citizens, neighbors, voters, and then technologists.
“As women, we need to support other women, and that’s great, but we also need to bring in other people to cheer for us — husbands, brothers, fathers, uncles!”
In the opening Keynote, Serena Williams talked about how we can be anything we want and how our ideas deserve to be seen and appreciated.
Take pride in your work. Take credit for your work. You are not an Imposter. You are a technologist — Dr. Olga Russakovesky.
From sessions like Relationships Are The True Currency: Create Your Personal Crew of Support to 5G, AI, and ML: How communications drives opportunities; people from all over the world tuned in to learn.
My biggest takeaway was, “ There is knowledge everywhere only if you start reading.”
I was super excited about Open Source Day, and the best thing was having beta access to GitHub codespaces. The hands-on workshops were peppered through the day helped me contribute to Open Source.
Contributing to open source is not an easy task, but there are tons of excellent maintainers there to help support you!
It was an amazing week of networking, workshops, and phenomenal keynotes. One of the most memorable sessions I attended talked about the differences between a mentor and a sponsor.
Mentors advise you, Sponsors advocate for you.
Find your tribe; it will take you far.
We all have the opportunity and responsibility to help drive change for ourselves and our organizations for the better.
Sometimes breaking glass is the only way to make progress -Marian Croak.
The best part was networking with women from diverse backgrounds, who gave me the best advice: Be curious, Be Brave, and Don’t forget to give back to the community.
Remember #TogetherWeBuild is an international call to action: community is what we need right now.
The celebrations ended with a virtual dance party.
