A software conference with only women on the podium - is that possible? Of course it is! And not just to prove this but also to share an extremely high level of knowledge the first women&&code conference took place in Vienna.

women&&code is a conference for software developers with exclusively female speakers. On Mar 8, 2024 the first edition took place at the “Sky” at the Technical university of Vienna (Austria), with the intention to show the often underrepresented brilliance of women in tech. The conference was sold out beforehand with 150 participants. The participants were mixed but to a large extent women working in software or IT companies with about 70% software engineers - according to a survey among participants.

As the Joomla User Group Vienna, we addressed the organizers beforehand and offered some support. I, Sigrid Gramlinger, got also asked to make a presentation about “Building an Open Source Community”.

So, there I was, at the international women’s day, holding a talk about my favorite topic to an extremely technical audience. I did a half hour session about how the Joomla community is working, what Open Source Matters is, how our release management works and which touchpoints we have, if you want to support the project.

My insights

After my presentation some participants came up to me and asked how to contribute to open source projects and if they could during their working hours.

At first I was a bit annoyed - of course they should contribute! But then while talking to them I realized that if you are not familiar with the way open source projects work, you just don’t know where to start.

I also became aware that it is not obvious how important it is to contribute! We should try to inform and encourage employers that their team members should be allowed to contribute during their working time - for example every Tuesday morning for 1 hour.

One participant told me that they have one day each month to spend on any internal or personal project. She is motivated now to use that day to contribute to open source projects and even if it is not Joomla, I am happy if she and at least one other person will be on track and support open source.

I will definitely take part in the next women&&code event and hopefully see more female speakers at tech events in the future - there are no excuses for “we could not find a female expert”, because they are there!

Youtube Video with some impressions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgR0gS7g4Qw 
Website: https://womenandcode.org/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/womenandcode