Monthly Archives: January 2017

01.22.17
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Nerd Girl Badges - Your Votes Please

As some of you may know the Nerd Girls group has produced lots of badges in the past which we’ve handed out at conferences including Connect around the world.  We haven’t produced new ones in a few years and we would like to do that again with a plan to have them available at IBM and non-IBM events as well as available to order on other items from a zazzle shop.

I’d like to thank the team of Kathy Brown, Maria Enderstam, Amanda Bauman, Wannes Rams, Francie Tanner, Katie Harrison, Jamie Magee and especially Jennifer Stevenson who managed to turn our ideas into the images below.

We hope to produce the images in badge format and in some cases decal format for sticking on cars or computers so we’d like some feedback from you. With Connect fast approaching we hope to have them to hand out to attendees there.

For each image please let me or any of the team know via comment or twitter , email or anything else and spread the word

  1. Do you like it
  2. Would you wear it / gift it as a badge
  3. Would you wear it / gift it as a decal
  4. Do you have an event you would like to distribute these at

Please bear in mind the materials aren’t sponsored in any way so we may have to make some hard choices about what and how many are produced to fit within our budget but we hope you like them all 🙂

nerdybynature

We think this works as both badge, decal and t shirt

ifiwereawoman

The guys said they would wear “if i were a girl I’d be a nerd girl”. We think this works as a badge

keepcalm

We think this works as badge and decal .. possibly t shirt

proud

this is slightly off brand but it replaces our ‘my daughter is a nerd girl” as a badge

We think this would work well as a decal for either computer or car

01.13.17
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Connect 2017 Plans & Presentations

I’m very excited to confirm that three of us from The Turtle Partnership will be at Connect 2017 in San Francisco in February.  Between us there is some overlap in what we hope to get out of a conference but our interests are very different. My fellow IBM Champion Mike Smith will be attending strategy briefings, client stories and anything to do with futures.  Tim who looks after the development side of Turtle is keen on Monday’s hackathon and the new technology sessions as well as the Workspace and Watson APIs.  For me, as well as technical sessions about new products, I’m working a lot in the hybrid and security spaces so those sessions (including my own) are of interest to me. I also always enjoy the expo and this year the pop up and theater sessions that fall outside the traditional breakouts are something very different I’m suspect I’ll get a lot out of.

I am presenting and hosting three sessions this year:

On Wednesday at 12pm in Moscone West, Level 2 - Room 2009 I am presenting

Benefits and Risks of a Single Identity

What is valuable about a single identity, why is that something people want and how achievable is it? As people work across multiple systems they encounter an equal number of barriers where they must authenticate or otherwise prove their identity in order to gain access. Ideally we always want to be showing the same information about ourselves regardless of where someone searches or how we are found. In this session we’ll discuss the issues behind both creating a single identity and simplifying authentication. We’ll also review the risks you need to be aware of, the technologies available to you and the importance of good and current personal information.

On both Wednesday and Thursday in the Expo Engagement Theaters on the Expo floor we are doing Nerd Girl sessions.  On Wednesday we will have sparks talks around the topic of The Imposter Syndrome and on Thursday around the topic of Relationships IRL.   

The Imposter Syndrome is about the feeling of being unqualified in a situation.  We are looking for only four speakers who can talk to that, either because they live it, have been through it and have lessons to share or have experience of working with or managing people who have it.

Relationships IRL is about how we build and maintain connections with people when many of us work alone, attend web meetings that have no time for small talk or spend the majority of our time looking down at devices and not out into the world.  Again we are looking for 4 people who can speak to those issues or even if you don’t consider it an issue and why.

The Sparks talks do not have to be about your work or career, both the Imposter Syndrome and Relationships IRL can refer to any aspect of your day to day life.

If you are going to be in San Francisco, would be interested in joining us or would consider speaking then please reach out to me or any of the Nerd Girls to discuss.

The really great news is that since both sessions are in a theater room on the Expo floor, anyone with a $89 USD Discover Connect pass can attend.

The Imposter Syndrome is on  Wednesday at 12pm EXPO Engagement Theater # 750

Relationships IRL is on Thursday at 9.20am EXPO Engagement Theater # 300

01.12.17
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What Kept Me Busy In 2016 and Where Am I Going Now?

I think this post might be just under the wire for 2016 reviews so let’s talk about what I was working on and learning for the past year.  I always need to be learning, if I’m not I feel like I’m standing still and last year most of my learning moved outside of the core IBM products simply because there was little new to learn.

So what kind of projects did I work on?

  • Security reviews of Domino, Connections, HTTP environments
  • Single Sign On projects including deploying SAML using ADFS and TFIM as well as lots of Kerberos / IWA integration projects
  • Designing hybrid environments for customers moving mail to the cloud
  • Lots of TLS configurations on lots of different products
  • IBM Connections upgrades to 5.5
  • IBM Sametime deployments from sites that had 8.5.2
  • Domino consolidation, maintenance and hardware migrations
  • High Availability for Traveler, Domino HTTP and Sametime

What was I learning?  I’m always looking for interesting and challenging technologies that can make a difference to those smaller customers who need to stretch a tight budget.  It’s how I got involved with Notes originally in the early 90s - It allowed me to make big changes quickly for smaller customers.  This year that has meant staying on top of cloud and hybrid security issues and single sign on products and technologies.  Beyond that I have become really interested in data visualisation and have been working with products like Tableau and some of its cheaper competitors to see what they can offer.

Then in December I signed up for a Lynda.com subscription to ensure I have a good grounding in wider technologies and how they can work together.  Of course signing up and actually making time to learn are two different things so that takes us to 2017.

Goals for 2017

  • More data visualisation tools / learning cool things to do with Tableau
  • Building myself a Lynda training plan
  • Deploying Verse on Premise for existing Domino customers and introducing those without Connections to that integration piece
  • More work with database technologies around performance and security
  • Identify ways to deploy docker solutions with better stability and security
  • Improving my languages (I’ve been working on Italian and want to learn Spanish)
  • Working on interesting projects or ones that make a difference

As you can see my “goals” are fairly loose, I am always open to new ideas for technologies to learn (except development languages - blech).  It may be my review of 2017 will be nothing like my goals list and I won’t consider that a failure.