GirlGeek Dinners Ottawa - May 2010: OpenAgile with Ellen Grove

This is a guest post written by CU-WISE Officer Laura Mutu.

I heard about the Girl Geek Dinners during the school year from a few ladies involved with the WISE Carleton group. I found the meetings pretty neat, so I decided to attend someday.

Having just finished my 3rd year of Communications Engineering, I have been busy keeping up withschool work and such. Thus, I found myself at work in May receiving yet another Girl Geek Dinner notification. And yet again, I went to check my calendar full of hope. And yay!!

I could actually attend the next meeting on OpenAgile by Elen Grove. That sounded pretty good especially since I had heard a few things about Agile, and this seemed like a great opportunity to put the bits and pieces together.

I marked the date and noticing the the student offer was still on, I applied right away. Having received my confirmation, I remained enthusiastic while waiting impatiently for the day of the event to arrive.

Fortunately, on one hand, time had gone away pretty fast until the day of the event came. Unfortunately on the other hand, none of the CU-WISE girls could show up.

Arriving at the Johnny Farina place downtown, I found an open and welcoming group which made me more enthusiastic. Then, I picked a seating spot at random, finally ending up next to a lady I have met previously through my extra-curricular activities. It was nice to see a known face, and even nicer to meet new ones, I found all participants to be really great and I appreciated all the different topics touched upon in the conversations, which varied from nutrition to sports.

And... the speaker’s time! I found the presentation engaging through all the activities we had going, and the speaker interactive as she was guiding us thorough the agile technique.
More details on the Agile technique itself discussed during the meeting:

http://girlgeekdinnersottawa.com/blog/2010/05/27/may-25th-ggd-ottawa-event-recap/

After the presentation, there were quite a few prizes given out. So, if the presenters or the sheer bonding experience don’t motivate you to come to one of the meetings, the prizes sure should!

In the end, we spent some more time networking and eating some good food, before heading out. Just to make my day complete, ‘my’ bus had a stop right in front of the restaurant.

I greatly enjoyed my time and recommend you to attend one of the meetings or join a lady attending :).