With around 25% female speakers, It's been a week of pleasant surprises at Microsoft Ignite NZ! Yes, of course, 25% is not enough. However year on year, it's been small steps in the right direction. I know speaker diversity is at the forefront of the organisers' minds, and I've been absolutely wowed by the calibre of speakers at Ignite on the whole.
Tuesday morning's keynote was fantastic! We had Hilary Barry with a Tshirt gun on stage – brilliant. It was awesome to see so many women on stage presenting, and then to hear afterwards that this had just happened organically! Brilliant. The highlight of the keynote for me was Dona Sarkar, who has been an idol of mine for a long while now. Her keynote was radically inspiring, and set the tone for the rest of the conference. Do The Thing! It's impossible not to be inspired when Dona speaks. I was absolutely honoured to be invited to her Windows Insiders dinner on Wednesday evening, where we got to hear what the group are doing across the country and offer assistance to each other where possible. Such a fantastic community!
I have to be honest, I came into my first Ignite a pretty wide eyed Microsoft n00b. With a background in design, I've been an Apple user virtually my whole life – with very little technical experience at all I might add. When putting together my schedule last week, it was really exciting to see such a strong focus on soft skills, mental health and the less technical side of the tech business. I love working in tech, and I have the highest admiration for the magic developers are able to make. However, my passion definitely lies in the project management, business development, people, social, and creative facets of a business.
With that said, I want to talk specifically about the women of Ignite who have inspired me this week.
First up – and although technically Marcus Radich is a man – I really want to include PageProof here because I was introduced to Marcus' cofounder Gemma Hurst this week, and she is an absolute wonder woman. At the first Ignite session I attended on Tuesday morning, Marcus spoke about scale-fail – a wonderfully refreshing topic to introduce the conference for me! I found myself nodding along heavily and feeling comforted in the fact that behind the scenes, no one has it all sorted perfectly and most of the time, the best solution truly is the one that works for your team. Speaking with Gemma afterwards and throughout the conference was invigorating, she has a passion for her business that is inspiring and unmistakable. I hope I grow up to be half as cool as her!
I was intrigued by Jennifer Marsman's keynote, in which she talked about her initial experiments with Azure Machine Learning in order to build a lie detector prototype which she tested on her husband. Jennifer is a truly fantastic speaker, and her introductory Machine Learning session was my favourite of the entire conference. I was initially a bit intimidated about attending such a technical talk, but Microsoft has built a really slick Machine Learning toolset that can be easily utilised by those without a technical or data science background. This is extremely exciting for a non-codey geek! I love the idea of being able to import data, play around, and make predictions using the simple Azure interface without having to write a single line of code.
On Thursday morning, I headed along to Mel Rowsell's 'brain hacks for techies'. The strong focus on soft skills at Ignite was truly awesome. Staying calm under pressure and remembering to stay mindful are skills that can make or break a great team, so it's always good to be reminded of that. It's clear Mel has an absolute wealth of insight in this area and it was fantastic to hear her share some easy to implement techniques for staying in control at work. I encourage you to check out her blog!
I was especially excited to hear from Melanie Langlotz and Amie Wolken of GeoARGames, as fellow kiwi entrepreneurs in the gaming industry! They shared a lot of insight into their startup journey, as well as an interesting look at their backgrounds and experience. Augmented Reality (or Mixed Reality...) is a super exciting space in my opinion, and it was a fantastic running theme throughout the conference – especially with the recent HoloLens dev kit release.
Of course this is not an exhaustive list of ALL the inspiring women of Microsoft Ignite NZ 2016 – just the ones I was fortunate enough to cross paths with this week! If you attended a session by an inspiring woman, please tell me about it below and link to their work. You can check out Channel 9 for some coverage, or keep an eye on the Ignite website for more comprehensive archive in the coming weeks.