Day two was a whirlwind! The day started off by catching a shuttle (charter bus) to the conference. After navigating through the Houston rush hour traffic we made it just in time to hear Hilary Mason, the founder of Fast Forward labs give a speech about where we are and where we’re going.
After that, the 14,000 women broke up into different sessions to learn about topics that interested them. I went to an IBM presentation on Platforms as a Service as well as Software as a Service. I learned a lot on how to scale up an application using cloud services as well as the benefits of hosting a web application through the cloud.
Lunchtime was basically the coolest. We showed up to the Facebook lunch about 45 minutes early when nobody else was there and got a lot of faceted with the Facebook engineers. Did you know that Facebook has a training program that lets you try out each part of the company and meet each team before committing to a team/area of expertise? How cool is that? We are clearly huge Facebook fans now, as if we need any more convincing.
After lunch. Kate, Emily and I went to a breakout session on Crucial Career Conversations. This session was hosted by the ladies of Yelp! and was great for learning different ways to approach the delicate workplace relationships that we will navigate on a daily basis. Kate and I were paired up on a team with professional women from Microsoft and Adobe. These ladies had a lot of advice for dealing with both interpersonal relationships as well as interviewing tips.
The day wrapped up with a HUGE career fair. Companies that are really changing the game in IT were at Grace Hopper. My favorite had to be FlatIron, a company in New York, NY that is collecting data on cancer patients to better help physicians diagnose and treat cancer patients with rare forms of the disease. Some of the girls on the trip are already signed up for interviews tomorrow, WISH THEM LUCK!
That is all for this evening. Tomorrow we will hear keynote speeches from both Susan Wojcicki (CEO of YouTube), Moira Forbes (Forbes Media), and Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook). So excited!