At the beginning of the night we said hello to Lynn Langit who introduced us to Anton Delsink, a Developer Evangelist based out of Dubai. At the events he presents at in his areas, oftentimes the rooms are completely void of females. As in not a single one. However, in Turkey the percentage of females is quite impressive. He said he once had an event where the entire front row were women, and all were engineers, physicists, and computer scientists.
While on the balcony, Ed and I met up with Barb Dybwad, a Senior Editor at Mashable. We had some great sarcastic and hilarious conversations. Ed and her were rapid fire with their comments. I took a back seat for a good chunk here, as this was when I was yawning and such. We hung out with her on and off for the rest of the night. All in all good times there.
While we still owned the table we were at on the balcony, we also met up with Jim Pinkelman of Microsoft. He has been a huge supporter of diversity efforts. He explained that there had money put toward such efforts all over the place, and he has been working on focusing the impacts so the funds are used in the most effective manner. Running into allies is always awesome!
I shot some footage of our journey to the Underground@PDC and it includes a few clips of the event as well.
Tags: conferences, Microsoft, Microsoft Student Insider, PDC, PDC09