Bay Area Girl Geeks Dinner

Lindsay, my only female coworker, and I went to San Francisco for the first Bay Area Girl Geeks dinner on Thursday, January 31st. These dinners were first put together in London and have been spreading around the globe. Angie Chang, of Women 2.0, organized this event and had it sponsored by Google. It was a great party! We were given plenty of space in both an outdoor tent and a lecture hall on the Google campus. They spoiled us with appetizers, sushi, open bar, and schwag!

The night was kicked off with some humor from Ellen Spertus, a research scientist at Google. The panel was moderated by Katherine Barr, a partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures The women on the panel were Leah Culver, Co-Founder and Lead Developer of Pownce; Sumaya Kazi, founder of The Cultural Connect and Sun Microsystem’s Social Media Manager; Irene Au, Google’s Director of User Experience; and Rashmi Sinha, CEO of SlideShare.

More than anything else, I was so impressed with the kindness of everyone I met at the dinner. It seems that San Francisco is a great place to network and people are really available to help each other. The panelists really reinforced relationship building. While they all use a lot of technology, they all rely primarily on personal connections.

After the panel, I met some great women. The ones that stick out in my memory are Erica, because she's my namesake! Plus, she recently sold her hosting business and temporarily retired. She told me she blogs a lot. Wow, I'm SO jealous. How I would love to be able to write all day. I also met Angie Chang, the organizer. She was so nice and very popular! (Do you see the stack of business cards in her hand? Everyone wanted to meet her!)

Finally, Lindsay and I met Arena who is a designer at Pivotal Labs. We had so much to talk about since our companies are in the same space and both using Agile methods. Arena invited us to their office the next day where we had breakfast and spent some time with Edward and Alex talking about Agile. It was a great learning experience! I was so, so impressed with the helpfulness and sharing from everyone at Pivotal. It will be great to see Arena again in March when we're both at SXSW.

Naturally, Lindsay and I took the opportunity for some sightseeing in San Francisco. I haven't been to San Francisco since 1995 when I visited a friend in Oakland. It's such a beautiful city (despite the rain). At the end of the day, we met some of my blogger / SXSW friends for dinner - Kristin, Jessica, and their significant others.

This was the perfect trip to me - a lovely mix of a little work, meeting new people, connecting with old friends, learning new things, and just a dash of sightseeing. Look at the set of all my pictures from San Francisco.

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Redesign

I owe a HUGE thank you to my two amazingly awesome coworkers for helping me with a site redesign. You both have my unending gratitude! Every time I look at this site, I will smile and think of you. Thank you!

Matt Gist designed this amazing theme. Doesn't it look awesome?!

Josh Huckabee implemented the theme, installed Drupal, and moved all my old content from MovableType. What a lot of work and definitely something I couldn't have done on my own.

When I started this site in 2001, I was on a free Blogger account (Blogspot maybe?). I upgraded to a Pro Blogger account in order to get my own domain name. (At least I think it was a Pro account...hard to remember the details now.) Soon I met the amazing couple, Mena & Ben Trott, the developers of Movable Type and founders of Six Apart. I was so impressed with what they were doing that I migrated to Movable Type. For the past 5 or 6 years, I've been using Movable Type and I've been very happy. I know Six Apart worked very hard to continually improve the product even though I didn't personally use 1/3 of the features. I was always impressed by how easy they made upgrades, especially for someone as non-technical as myself.

For awhile now I've wanted a new design on my blog. Matt was wonderful enough to take on the task. I absolutely love the cactus graphic! Perfect for my love of the desert. Matt even helped with the HTML and CSS. Then I tried to implement the design into a Movable Type template. Unfortunately, this task turned out to be far, far above my technical abilities. I simply didn't have the knowledge of Movable Type any more and I didn't have the desire to learn. I'm just not a template designer.

The design languished on the back burner until Josh heard my frustration and offered to help. He's been working with Drupal for years and said it wouldn't be hard to integrate Matt's design into a Drupal template. The hardest part was migrating all my old posts and comments. But he worked hard and here was are! I'm still learning the application and tweaking things, but mostly I'm excited. It's great to have a shiny new page for my little corner of the web.

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About Erica

I started blogging in 2001 for the following reasons.

• The web was so new (to me) and fascinating. I wanted to learn HTML and later CSS.
• It was an easy way to inform my friends & family who lived in other places of my daily life and to keep that history for myself.
• I had been reading other people's blogs and felt it was only fair if I produced as well as consumed.

I had no idea at the time that it would change my life. Blogging has given me friendships that I would never had otherwise. I'm so blessed by those friendships.

In 2001, blogging was simply a place to share personal stuff with other people. In 2008, blogging is business. Change is the only constant.

I'm married to Chris Altman and we live in Phoenix, Arizona, with our three dogs - Stewie, Bentley, & Mac. We both grew up in Arlington, Texas, where we went to high school together. We started dating after our ten-year high school reunion and got married in May 2008.

I have two sisters who are also on the web - Karen & Kristen. I guess blogging changed more than just my life; the lives around me as well.

Chris and I are getting more and more into riding bicycles. We're lucky to live in a city with a wonderful network of bike lanes and paths. (I love Phoenix.) We also love making things. Chris does woodworking and I like to sew. We both love to learn new things so there's always a project going on around here.

Currently I work for OpenRain, a company that excels in web design, web development, web marketing, and mobile application development. My role is a mix of project management, customer service, and consulting. I love being close to technology and daily interaction with the developers. I also love our customers! If you want to know more about my work and education, just ask! I'm especially proud of my bachelors in fine art from Texas Tech University and MBA from Southern Methodist University.

Contact me if you're interested in my resume and previous job history.