Last night I participated in the 3rd Amsterdam Girl Geek Dinner and I'm so happy I was able to! The dinner was at a very cool bar called the Flexbar in Amsterdam. About 30 or 35 people showed up. The GGD is run by three women. One of them is Melanie Rieback who is actually an ex-pat American and a Comp Sci professor at a local university. I mean Dr. Melanie Rieback. Melanie just defended her doctorate based on research she has been doing with RFID security. It's really inspiring to be around people like her. She's quite outspoken and had attended a GGD elsewhere and decided to start one in Amsterdam. Everyone was very welcoming. There was a great variety of tech represented there. I was happy to see Danielle Loppe who works on the Expression team at Microsoft's Amsterdam office. I had chatted with Danielle earlier that week at the SDN Conference. There was a pair of women who are well known researchers of the Semantic Web. They were happy to be in a room where they didn't have to explain what that meant. There were a lot of nationalities represented as well including a few other American ex-pats, a gal from New Zealand and others.

I had a lot of fun doing this talk which was aimed at inspiring the women to take advantage of the many learning opportunities out there to enhance their knowledge and/or their career. Melanie offered a lot of tips for getting to conferences.We talked about participating in forums and  a variety of things. Melanie also encouraged me to talk a little bit about the Entity Framework which was interesting to do since I had to do it in a generic enough way that it could be understood by folks who are not necessarily developers or data geeks.

We stayed pretty late. I think I got back to my hotel after midnight.

Then I hd to get up very early to head to London by train and that is where I am now (London, not train).

I just saw that tonight's London Girl Geek dinner (with room for 150) is sold out. It's coincidentally at Microsoft's office. I'll try to report back after the fact. I'll be speaking along with Dr. Elisabeth Kelan, a Sr Research Fellow at the Lehman Center for Women in Business at the London School of economics. How impressive is that?! 

I'm going to do some sightseeing for a few days (in between hiding in my hotel to work on my book edits) and then head to Sofia for DevReach on Sunday morning.

Dave Sussman is hoofing it (okay, taking the train) into London tomorrow and we're going to go wander around the V&A. Saturday is a play day with Python.NET guru Michael Foord and his wife, Delia. Looking forward to it!

Tata.