I was invited by Mala Devlin to participate in a panel discussion titled “Software Soul: Maximizing profitability by unleashing the spirit of software teams”. This topic sounded very interesting to me since I have managed projects and global teams for several years at my jobs in the US and in multinational companies in India.

Mala and I met for tea for the first time in July  and discussed the topic and more. I was impressed that Mala had recently published a book called  The Software Soul. The book is an easy read and had several anecdotes that are very easy to …

It was wonderful to meet with my panelists and be able to put a name to the face. We had been communicating occasionally prior to the conference. Face-to-face contact adds a completely new dimension to an interaction. It was a pleasure meeting all of the panelists!

(L->R): Kristin Rozier (NASA); Sumitha Prashanth (Sun Microsystems-India); Radha Ratnaparkhi (IBM); Claudia Galvan (Microsoft); Bev Crair (Quantum); Meenakshi Kaul-Basu (Sun Microsystems); Lydia Ash (Google)

The discussion went very well.  I had prepped the panelists on some questions that I  would ask to seed the discussion. Otherwise, I preferred to keep …

Today 02 October is Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday. It was nice to see the Google home page honouring Gandhi ji.

It was otherwise a normal day at GHC 09 with a very enthusiastic and energetic crowd of computer engineers. There was a fantastic keynote presentation by Fran Berman, Vice President for Research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, called “Creating Technology for Social Good, A Prologue”.

Dr. Berman focused on the future of the information age and how we are going to keep and archive current information. We need to archive the information because “access tomorrow starts with preservation today.” Along with what …

I am glad that I got Jo Miller’s Workshop early. The tables filled up well before the 2:00 start time, at this year’s sold out Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing!

Jo Miller starts off stating: if you want to be a leader, you have to be a leader! Nobody will ever tap you on the shoulder and tell you they think you should be one - you have to take charge yourself.

She notes that power & influence can be used for evil manipulation, but it’s obviously not her intention to teach us any of these tricks.

Miller notes that if …

I am at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2009 at Tuscon, Arizona. This is my fourth time at this conference and I hope to be able to come back to more. There are enthusiastic and energetic crowd of 1,600 technical women in industry, faculty, and students from 22 countries!

Few people, in the recent past, seem to know about Grace Hopper. Admiral Grace Hopper was one of the pioneer Computer programmers in 1940’s.  You can read more about her in the Biography of Naval History.  Grace Hopper popularized the term “bug” as applied to computers and it was …