I saw a girl (once)

After having been accused of writting one of those "what I had for breakfast blogs", I'm trying to step it up again despite my travels.

My current conference is The Spring Experience. It has to do with the open source java framework Spring, and all the great things you can do with it when developing your enterprise applications. Too Sexy, Too Sexy!!!

This conference is reminding me of college and not always in a good way. Which gets me to the title of this post. Being a computer science major in college, the first thing you realize is that you are not going to be meeting any women in your major. The sex ratio in my computer science classes college was probably 20 men to 1 woman. Every class was a sausage festival. I remember looking forward to my electives, because I knew there would actually be girls in the classes.

Just like college this conference is not any better. In fact I think the ratio here is alot worse. I am guessing it is 50:1. The few girls I knew in my major, I can't recall any going on to be software engineers. They usually went into sales or a more general tech field. (No where here did I say girls don't make good software engineers. I knew plenty of great female software engineers in grad school. So, no hate mail please, N.O.W. members. If there is a N.O.W. member that reads my blog I would be amazed!!! but i digress)

I have no problem hanging out with a bunch of dudes. Can I take that statement back ? I have a small problem hanging out with doods for long periods of time. Things digress socially. I'm not talking about seeing how many pushups we can do, Alpha Male football team style. Among computer science guys, the term Alpha Male usually doesn't apply. (I'm a computer science guy writting this, so if some computer geek wants to write me hate mail. Just back off son. I'm sure you are a L33T H4X0R.) There is just a definite lack of extraverted people. It is hard to get energy going among a large group of software engineers. We sip coffee and stare at computer monitors all day. We speak in terms of Abstraction, Objects, and Algorithm. We use acronyms like POJO, DAO, and EJB. It can be barely called English at times.

I think adding a few women to the scene would really change this thing around. There definitely would be little more incentive for the doods here to get some energy going if a woman was at the other side of the interaction. Maybe hotels that see conferences such as this are coming to town, they could advertise it to female software engineers in the local newspapers? Get them to show up for the conference and brighten the place up a little. Or maybe we need to have a some kind of ratio enforced much like a single mixer. (I'm not saying anyone should be looking for dates here. Hellz no. But I'm sure there are probably some doods here that wouldn't mind finding that a singles mixer is taking place during the conference.)

So whats my point? I have no idea. Girls are nice to look at and for other things too (not I would know what those other things are). And in the computer science field I would say they are like putting potpourri in the bathroom. They make something that stinks at times, smell just a little better.