These dinners first began in London in 2005, when software engineer Sarah Blow got fed up attending tech events as one of only a handful of women. So rare, in fact, that others present assumed she couldn’t have been an engineer. So after brainstorming on the train home one night, Girl Geek Dinners was born. Since its humble beginnings, Girl Geek Dinner groups have opened up all over the world including the United States, South Africa and Croatia.
The recent Sydney dinner saw more than 75 attend, and aside from everyone receiving the popular squishable Android plushie as a take-home gift, there was a series of useful tech-talks.
For example, the event’s keynote speaker Sasha Bermeister spoke about the Twitter Bootstrap framework, telling us what it is, how it works and, in her own words, “why it’s so awesome”. She took us through some of the more compelling features and showed us how easy it was to get a responsive website up and running in no time. Googler Grace Chung spoke and demoed Google's Knowledge Graph, and Nicky Ringland talked about attracting high school students, particularly girls, into computer science through the NCSS Challenge.
Silvia Pfeiffer covered how next-generation browser technology and HTML5 can enable plugin-less videoconferencing. For something different, Kris Howard revealed the science of knitting geekery and how technology is being used to solve the first-world problem of using your smartphone’s touchscreen while wearing gloves.
Girl Geek Dinners continue to grow here in Australia with groups springing up in Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, and Perth. For more information about future Girl Geek Sydney meetups, you can sign up here as well as follow @GGDSydney on Twitter.
Posted by Eddy Mead and Katie Bell, software engineers and Geek Girl Dinner organisers, Google Australia
