I’d like to share some experiences from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, where I was joined by my colleagues Marjorie Asturias, Deborah Beckett, Mo Carter, Rebecca Collins, Kelly Dwan, and Megan Marcel.

Picture an airplane hangar-sized space full of women bobbing to rhythmic pop music, neon glowing necklaces dotting the crowd. This was the closing party for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC), a massive conference devoted to women studying or working in technology, and named in honor of the legendary computer scientist and United States Navy Rear Admiral.

It was an intense few October days in Houston, Texas, where the 16th edition of GHC drew 15,000 international participants, from computer-science and software-engineering college students to established professionals working at large technology companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Apple.

Automattic was proud to host a booth at the career fair, where we chatted with many young women getting started in their technology careers. We introduced a series of postcards featuring Automatticians, which you can see on our new Diversity and Inclusion page. The cards showcase the wide range of people working at Automattic from their home bases across the globe, in roles from Data Scientist to Happiness Engineer.

I also had an opportunity to attend some sessions at the conference itself. Highlights included a talk about how to negotiate more effectively, a skill a lot of women find rather challenging. According to the presenter, we tend to negotiate well on others’ behalves, but many of us — including me — find that negotiating for ourselves can be difficult! Another thought-provoking session was a panel discussion with women who have created tools to help bypass unconscious bias during the hiring and interviewing process. I also attended a public speaking workshop; since I also run public speaking workshops, it was useful to see one from a participant’s perspective. I picked up some good tips on how to handle a larger group — there were at least a hundred women at this one, in a huge ballroom.

My week at GHC was inspiring and exhausting, but more than anything, it was energizing to be around so many women passionate about technology.

Looking for your own adventure in tech? We’re hiring!

Filed under: Events

I’d like to share some experiences from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, where I was joined by my colleagues Marjorie Asturias, Deborah Beckett, Mo Carter, Rebecca Collins, Kelly Dwan, and Megan Marcel.

Picture an airplane hangar-sized space full of women bobbing to rhythmic pop music, neon glowing necklaces dotting the crowd. This was the closing party for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC), a massive conference devoted to women studying or working in technology, and named in honor of the legendary computer scientist and United States Navy Rear Admiral.

It was an intense few October days in Houston, Texas, where the 16th edition of GHC drew 15,000 international participants, from computer-science and software-engineering college students to established professionals working at large technology companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Apple.

Automattic was proud to host a booth at the career fair, where we chatted with many young women getting started in their technology careers. We introduced a series of postcards featuring Automatticians, which you can see on our new Diversity and Inclusion page. The cards showcase the wide range of people working at Automattic from their home bases across the globe, in roles from Data Scientist to Happiness Engineer.

I also had an opportunity to attend some sessions at the conference itself. Highlights included a talk about how to negotiate more effectively, a skill a lot of women find rather challenging. According to the presenter, we tend to negotiate well on others’ behalves, but many of us — including me — find that negotiating for ourselves can be difficult! Another thought-provoking session was a panel discussion with women who have created tools to help bypass unconscious bias during the hiring and interviewing process. I also attended a public speaking workshop; since I also run public speaking workshops, it was useful to see one from a participant’s perspective. I picked up some good tips on how to handle a larger group — there were at least a hundred women at this one, in a huge ballroom.

My week at GHC was inspiring and exhausting, but more than anything, it was energizing to be around so many women passionate about technology.

Looking for your own adventure in tech? We’re hiring!

Filed under: Events

I’d like to share some experiences from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, where I was joined by my colleagues Marjorie Asturias, Deborah Beckett, Mo Carter, Rebecca Collins, Kelly Dwan, and Megan Marcel.

Picture an airplane hangar-sized space full of women bobbing to rhythmic pop music, neon glowing necklaces dotting the crowd. This was the closing party for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC), a massive conference devoted to women studying or working in technology, and named in honor of the legendary computer scientist and United States Navy Rear Admiral.

It was an intense few October days in Houston, Texas, where the 16th edition of GHC drew 15,000 international participants, from computer-science and software-engineering college students to established professionals working at large technology companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Apple.

Automattic was proud to host a booth at the career fair, where we chatted with many young women getting started in their technology careers. We introduced a series of postcards featuring Automatticians, which you can see on our new Diversity and Inclusion page. The cards showcase the wide range of people working at Automattic from their home bases across the globe, in roles from Data Scientist to Happiness Engineer.

I also had an opportunity to attend some sessions at the conference itself. Highlights included a talk about how to negotiate more effectively, a skill a lot of women find rather challenging. According to the presenter, we tend to negotiate well on others’ behalves, but many of us — including me — find that negotiating for ourselves can be difficult! Another thought-provoking session was a panel discussion with women who have created tools to help bypass unconscious bias during the hiring and interviewing process. I also attended a public speaking workshop; since I also run public speaking workshops, it was useful to see one from a participant’s perspective. I picked up some good tips on how to handle a larger group — there were at least a hundred women at this one, in a huge ballroom.

My week at GHC was inspiring and exhausting, but more than anything, it was energizing to be around so many women passionate about technology.

Looking for your own adventure in tech? We’re hiring!

Filed under: Events

I’d like to share some experiences from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, where I was joined by my colleagues Marjorie Asturias, Deborah Beckett, Mo Carter, Rebecca Collins, Kelly Dwan, and Megan Marcel.

Picture an airplane hangar-sized space full of women bobbing to rhythmic pop music, neon glowing necklaces dotting the crowd. This was the closing party for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC), a massive conference devoted to women studying or working in technology, and named in honor of the legendary computer scientist and United States Navy Rear Admiral.

It was an intense few October days in Houston, Texas, where the 16th edition of GHC drew 15,000 international participants, from computer-science and software-engineering college students to established professionals working at large technology companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Apple.

Automattic was proud to host a booth at the career fair, where we chatted with many young women getting started in their technology careers. We introduced a series of postcards featuring Automatticians, which you can see on our new Diversity and Inclusion page. The cards showcase the wide range of people working at Automattic from their home bases across the globe, in roles from Data Scientist to Happiness Engineer.

I also had an opportunity to attend some sessions at the conference itself. Highlights included a talk about how to negotiate more effectively, a skill a lot of women find rather challenging. According to the presenter, we tend to negotiate well on others’ behalves, but many of us — including me — find that negotiating for ourselves can be difficult! Another thought-provoking session was a panel discussion with women who have created tools to help bypass unconscious bias during the hiring and interviewing process. I also attended a public speaking workshop; since I also run public speaking workshops, it was useful to see one from a participant’s perspective. I picked up some good tips on how to handle a larger group — there were at least a hundred women at this one, in a huge ballroom.

My week at GHC was inspiring and exhausting, but more than anything, it was energizing to be around so many women passionate about technology.

Looking for your own adventure in tech? We’re hiring!

Filed under: Events

We’re big fans of publishing here at WordPress.com. From fantastic content created by our blogging community and news from our WordPress.com VIP partners, to longform articles on Longreads, we love helping publish the best content on the internet.

In that spirit, Automattic sponsored the Codex Hackathon last month. The event brought together over 160 people who are passionate about reading to the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, MA. Librarians, writers, editors, programmers, and designers came from all across the globe to collaborate on small weekend-long projects to visualize the future of reading. Mel Choyce, Kelly Dwan, Kat Hagan, and I attended from Automattic, and we were eager to meet and collaborate with the like-minded crowd. It’s not often that such a diverse group has the opportunity to drop everything and come together around something they love.

Photo by Elisa Mala

The weekend kicked off with a series of short presentations on Saturday morning. Attendees learned about tools (like the WordPress.com API!) and saw examples of publishing challenges for inspiration. Those of us who came with pre-imagined project ideas shared them with the group, and those who didn’t could either join a team, or participate in a brainstorming exercise. The attendees mingled and shared ideas, and project teams started forming.

I joined a team, while Mel, Kelly, and Kat pitched in with design and development help across many different projects. The rest of Saturday was spent meeting new people, brainstorming, sketching, designing, and writing code. Our Codex hosts kept us well-fed throughout, and the atmosphere was exciting and inspiring. Teams worked well into the evening on Saturday, and were up bright and early on Sunday to polish our projects.

Photo by Elisa Mala

The event culminated in a set of short presentations from each team. It was thrilling to see the different ideas people worked on. Due to the incredibly short weekend timeline, many projects were still in the conceptual phase, but we were treated to quite a few application demos as well. You can check out the full list of projects at the Codex Hackathon 2016 projects page. Some of my personal favorites:

• Stanza: A tool to deliver a playlist of poems tied to a person’s mood and emotion.
• LitCity: Literary context, delivered into the real world through location-based phone notifications.
• Cover Design History: The beginnings of a website dedicated to book cover design.
• HippoReader: A tool for programmatically simplifying the language in a given text, to make it readable even by those with a elementary English language skills.
• ReadMember: A web-browser extension to help you keep track of the things you read online.

We all had a blast at the event, and thoroughly enjoyed working with everyone. The Codex Hackathon left us inspired to keep building ways for you to publish your own great content here at WordPress.com and beyond.

Check out the Codex Hackathon website to keep up to date on more Codex events, and read through our getting started guide if you’d like to start building something cool with the WordPress.com API.

If building publishing tools for a more democratic web sounds like your idea of fun, we’re hiring!

Filed under: Admin Bar, Community, Events