Last Thursday, Dr. Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd College, visited my university and gave a talk on how she increased the number of female computer science (CS) majors at Harvey Mudd College (HMC). Currently, the percentage of female CS majors at HMC is 45%. The percentage at CSUSB is 12%, which is about the percentage of the national average.

She proposed a change to HMC’s introductory programming course, CS5, which is a required course for all HMC students. Previously, CS5’s curriculum was taught in a way that benefited students with prior programming experience. Klawe acknowledged that most women have their first experience with programming in college. She proposed that the course be divided into two sections: gold and black. The gold section is for students without prior experience, and the black section is for students with prior experience. The faculty at HMC implemented this change and students have responded positively to it.

Klawe also decided to send HMC’s female CS majors to the Grace Hopper Conference, which highlights notable women involved in computing. HMC fundraises to pay for the students’ expenses. Intel and IBM are two of the companies that donated money to this effort.

She talked about the importance of having more women involved in computing fields. Society needs to have diverse groups of people providing their perspectives during the development of new technologies. Increasing the number of women is increasing diversity.

I admire Klawe’s efforts because they give women a strong exposure to computing. All women at HMC have the opportunity to determine whether the field interests them.

I’m curious about how effective these efforts are when implemented at larger institutions that are publically funded (HMC is prvate institution with 750 students).

Yesterday was the last day of my first LISA conference. I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on the experience and feeling excited about the new ideas generated and connections made as a result of attending. Two months ago, I seriously considered going to LISA after finding out that I could apply for a student grant. I asked my friend Dybra if she was interested in attending LISA, and she wanted to as much as I did. We made reservations, submitted our grant proposals, and nervously awaited a response from USENIX.

Our proposals were awarded.

Thursday

Dybra drove through the rainy, foggy darkness (like a champion) to get me and got us to the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina safely.

We signed up for Theodore Tso’s “Linux Performance Tuning” training session and I managed to get seated in the room during the first break. Tso gave a clear and organized lecture on the different ways a sysadmin can improve the performance of Linux systems based on the area that needs to be optimized. I was unfamiliar with some of the topics (filesystem tuning, network tuning) and had a basic understanding of others (how to analyze memory usage, assesing which storage is appropriate for your system). I took a lot of notes and will be performing some experiments in the coming weeks.

After the training session, Dybra and I discussed whether or not we should attend the reception. We were afraid of feeling out of place and not being able to leave (one does not simply exit a ship sailing in a bay). Soon before it was time to board the busses, I knew the answer. We had to go. We’d come to the conference to meet people in the community. People whose blogs we’ve read and whose books sit on our desks at work. People who worked for the companies that produce the software we use. The reception would be the best time to do so because everyone was more likely to be involved in meatspace activities.

We had an amazing time. George Marselis and his co-workers invited us to eat with them, and we were escorted around the boat to meet sysadmins, researchers, and educators who welcomed us to the community and gave us advice on growing in the profession. Some names: Carolyn Rowland (this year’s program chair), Steve VanDevender, Mike Ciavarella, Patrick Cable, David Blank-Edleman, Tom Limoncelli, Selena Deckleman, and Nicole Forsgren Velasquez.

I told a lot of people about CSUSB’s System Administration degree option for the Computer Systems major. Apparently the program is not well-known. I’ll be writing a post about it this week.

After the reception, I sat in on the discussion happening during the “.edu System Administration” Birds of a Feather session and did some mingling in the Google BoF party-session.

Friday

Got dressed and rushed downstairs to get water to drink so my dull hangover-headache would fade away. Looked at the job postings on the board in the hallway. I noticed that Matt Simmons was manning the LOPSA table, so I went over to say hi (his blog was one of the first sysadmin blogs I started reading regularly), become a student member, and get information about starting a LOPSA chapter at CSUSB.

Watched Tom Limoncelli give a presentation on Ganeti and Doug Hughes give a talk about some complicated problems he and his team had to solve before they turned into disasters, and the lessons he learned as a result.

Dybra and I drunk coffee. Lots of coffee.

A while later everyone gathered into the Grande Ballroom to watch Geoff Halprin present the closing keynote “15 Years of DevOps.” He gave a brief history of software development, system administration, and DevOps, a movement that aims to improve collaboration between development and operations teams to more efficiently produce software. He stressed that DevOps is not a new concept and showed slides from presentations he did over a decade ago regarding the same issues discussed in the movement today. He also noted that DevOps is not applicable to some environments but encouraged people to examine its practices with an open mind.

We couldn’t stay for the ice cream social because we had a long drive back home. I wanted to thank a bunch of people during the social. Instead I will give my thanks here to everyone we met at the conference, as well as the following people:

• Javier Torner, our grant advisor
• Ryan Hundley and Google University Programs, for sponsoring the conference and the student grants
• Rikki Endsley, for answering all my questions about applying for the grants.

I was keeping a blog on Tumblr until I learned about Octopress through my Twitter feed.

Octopress is a framework for blogging with Jekyll, a static site generator that is written in Ruby. It’s very simple to set up because the documentation is organized and easy to understand.

I started blogging using Octopress for three reasons:

1. I want to become more familiar with using git and github to manage source code for projects.

2. I wanted the abiility to easily backup my blog using scripts and utilities that I have on my host machine.

3. I’m in love with the default theme. Seriously. I’ll be customizing it, but it looks nice the way it is. Very clean and organized, with nice fonts. I’m in no rush to make changes to the theme because it’s not an eyesore.

I recommend Octopress if you’re a bit familiar with git and Ruby and if you’re interested in creating a blog with static pages. I also recommend using the Ruby enVironment Manager (rvm) to install Ruby and manage different versions when using Octopress. I had an issue with previewing chages to my generated pages because Octopress ended up using the wrong verison of Ruby (a version I was using for another project). To fix this, I unistalled Ruby and reinstalled the versions I needed using rvm.