Women in technology

Today I found a new blog for a female dev. Her name is Nicole Sullivan-Haas. I read some of the CSS articles she has posted on her blog and I must say, I learned a lot. I still have many articles left to read, but I came across the article that was on her front page entitled "Woman in technology". I agree with her on several points like the definition of "The Code Cowboy", "The Good Developer" and that the dev community certainly is a "Sausage Fest".

With that said let me say that I am all for having more women in the dev field. Truthfully, I would prefer to be working with women mostly because it is not such a competition on who is smarter. I currently work in an I.T. department that does not have any females. I have worked with only a few female devs in my career and those each I would not hire if it was my choice. This has nothing to do with them being women, but instead it has to do with their attitudes and abilities. So what I am saying is although my preference is to work with women, I cannot say I have a lot of experience working with female devs. In the end I really do not care if my co-worker is female or male, but if all experience and abilities are equal I would probably choose a female dev just to keep the environment from being a "Sausage Fest".

My problem here and the reason for my post is more aimed at how people think it is ok to create things like "2010 Google EMEA Travel and Conference Grants for female computer scientists". When you say "for female", you just became sexist. Why am I not good enough to get this grant? Because I am a guy? So because I was born of the opposite sex I cannot apply for this grant. Is me being a guy mean I have more money to spend to attend this conference? Does me being a guy mean I do not need to learn what they have to teach at this conference?

Things like this frustrate me. People say they want to be treated as an equal, but then they find something to like their gender, race, age, etc. to make themself stand out. If you want to be treated equal then fine, give me the same opportunities. Don't exclude me because of my gender. This all just goes to show me how our society cannot learn from our own past. We still have racism running rampent in our society and we only go on to show how we never learned from how wrong that is.

I did not come from a rich family who paid my way through college, in fact I have paid for all the college classes I have attended. I am a self taught dev, who has spent the last 15 years of my life teaching myself to program and design. I have busted my butt to keep my job, do the best I can and learn everything I can on my own. To see something like this just rubs me the wrong way, because it just tells me that it does not matter what you have done or worked to do, you don't deserve any help.

Yours truly,
Bitter Party of 1.

Dexterity Class Review

Well I had originally planned to post this over the weekend, but it was much more fun just to lounge around in my own place again. I really don't do well in hotels. Never can get enough sleep, but that's not what this post is about.

Last week I attended the Dexterity I training at Integrated Business Group over in Orlando. The class was taught by Leslie Vail. I originally met Leslie up in Fargo, ND at the Microsoft Dynamics Tech conference. David Musgrave introduced me to her after I told him I was looking for a good place to take a class on some of the Dynamics GP program. Leslie teaches the class for IBG once a year at this point due to the lack of people requesting to go. There were only six of us attending the class and one of those six actually was a new IBG employee.

The price of the course is just under $3,000.00 USD. This may be a good reason the attendance is low for the course. I don't know many people that can afford to spend that kind of money for training. I got lucky in that my company paid for me to go, as well as paying for my hotel. I only had to take care of my transportation and food. Since Orlando is only an hour and a half away, the transportation was easy (no flight).

Overall I would have to give the week long class a 4 1/2 stars out of 5. The only reason I do not give the class a 5 stars was the course ware. It was a bit out of date. The books still ready that it was for Dynamics GP 9, when now MS is releasing version 11 (aka GP 2010). I would have at least expected that it be upgraded to version 10 by now.

Leslie made sure to note where things where different though. Her instruction was done very well and she is very, very knowledgeable about Dexterity and about GP. In the past I have been to other classes where you could tell that the presenter/instructor was not what you would consider a guru. However, in this case I would certainly consider Leslie to be a guru on the subjects of Dexterity and GP.

Throughout the week Leslie made sure that we were having a good time and tried to keep the class light with some funny videos. She also made sure to take down any notes of things we saw that could be improved in Dexterity or GP.

So if your looking for some training in Dexterity I highly suggest you look into this course. It is well worth the money. If your not looking for a week long course then perhaps you should drop by Leslie's blog and bug her to post more on her blog.  :)

Time to go put some of that new knowledge to work. Till next time.