The First All Girls' Hack Night was a success

The first meetup of Austin's All Girls' Hack Night attracted thirty or so women. Most of them were software developers; a few were web designers. They had a varied set of skills. Without taking a formal count, I got an impression that the most popular skill was .NET development. Javascript, CSS and HTML were also widely represented. There was also a smaller percentage of developers who specialized in Java, Ruby on Rails, and PHP. Many of them had worked with more than one technology. Most seemed to be recent college graduates, or still in college, but a few women have been in software industry for more than a decade.

After the introductions some women told us about their hobby programming projects. Amy Unruh (@amygdala) spoke about ThinkupApp.com, an open source project she is involved with. It's an application that analyzes your social network statistics -- Facebook and Twitter friends and followers, replies to you and retweets of your posts, and such. The project is lead by Gina Trapani, and was praised by Amy as being friendly to new developers; thus, a good candidate for somebody looking for an open source project to be involved with.

Next, Rekha Gupta told us about her two spare time projects. One is flea.com -- a game where you can pretend to be a flea, and later, through a merit system, progress to a higher animal (she warned me that there is nothing currently at this URL). The other is elibrary -- a web application that lets you upload free domain books, and convert them to digital formats, so you could download them on various e-readers (open formats only).

After the introductions there was time to socialize and work on our projects. Cowork Austin was a good space for both activities, since it has several rooms for a group even as big as this to comfortably spread out with their laptops. The other sponsor, a recruiting firm Vaco Technology, provided wine, beer, cupcakes and tasty snacks. This was, by many people's accounts, a successful meeting. A big thank you goes out to Garann Means (@garanm), the organizer of this meetup.

More information about this group can be found on its meetup.com page.

- Elze (geekitude (Elze)