A fitting title … my very first C++ program, and now the title of my very first blog entry!
So, welcome! I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, but it was unsettling to me to think I would be sharing my thoughts online with the world! I’m over that now, and I am excited to share my experiences and interests with everyone. How did I get over it? Well, a lot of that had to do with my return from Lotusphere 2006 in Orlando, FL. I had such a great experience, a wonderful time, and met a lot of neat people – with blogs! When I got home, I thought of so many things I wanted to write about, I decided to take the leap and just do it (like nike)! If you read the About Me page, you’ll get an idea of my background and interests.
Lotusphere 2006 – it was amazing! It was (obviously) my first time at Lotusphere – a conference that has been going on for the past 13 years! This year there was a huge turnout – I was overwhelmed by the number of people there. It was so refreshing to see all these people excited about the Lotus products, attending sessions, talking with developers in the lab, and moseying around with their shiny new bumble bee lap top backpacks. I had so much fun in the lab talking with customers and answering questions for people. My expertise at the moment is in the area of Archiving and Domino Domain Monitoring. I gave a session on DDM called “Getting the Most out of your Lotus Domino Domain Monitoring Probes”. It was very well attended – standing room only, and we got some great evaluations and feedback. Thank goodness – because as a first time Lotusphere attendee and first time Lotusphere presenter I had no idea what to expect, or what I was getting into! Ignorance is bliss – sometimes anyway! In regards to my presentation, when I stood up on stage and looked out before me onto the sea of people – a packed house – I thought … “alright, so this is what it is going to be like, cool!” I think that was the best way for me to approach that experience – not overanalyzing what it was going to be like ahead of time, just getting up there and taking it all in at the last moment! I am extremely happy about how the presentation went, and I think we got people really excited about DDM – at least that’s what I read from the evaluations. We did some live demos with DDM, which was pretty cool because we were able to show the new DDM Probe configuration documents, run the probes, and then check out DDM.nsf to see what kind of reports were generated. We were even able to take things a step further and show some out of the box corrective actions available – with a click of a button a mail file was opened, an ACL was brought up, and we were able to make the necessary changes to fix the problem reported to DDM. It’s such a powerful new feature, and everyone clapped at the custom corrective action code we demo’d at the end which included a one click solution for executing a database FixUp command from DDM to a remote server console!
I also had a great time attending the parties and hanging out with my team! There were only two negative things that happened the entire week:
1. Wednesday night, late – after Sea World – got talking to an attendee about Blackberry. His comments to me went something like this …
person: “Sweetheart, I’m not talking about the fruit – I’m talking about the handheld device. Most girls I know get confused by this point.”
me: “I knew what you were talking about, actually I am an engineer at IBM, I know what a Blackberry is.”
person: “Yeah, right … you’re an engineer!? [laughing hysterically] No way … you have Sales and Marketing written all over you!”
That’s great, I really enjoyed that conversation.
2. Another good one happened in the Meet the Developers Lab the next morning:
person: “Aren’t you a little young to be working for IBM” [in a condescending, disapproving tone]
me: “I guess I just look young, because I’ve been with the company for 5 years and am in my mid-twenties”
person: “oh, ok” [looked astonished]. Thanked me for my help, shook my hand, and walked away.
That last one wasn’t as bad as the first one, but it was still a little bothersome to me. It’s difficult for me to be taken seriously sometimes in this business, but lucky for me, the people that really count – my team, my manager, everyone at work, actually anyone who knows me – would never second guess my abilities or commitment to my work and engineering interests. I shouldn’t let other’s comments bother me.
I’m a big dork at heart … even if that sentiment doesn’t always come through at first glance. Believe me … I have the scooter to prove it!
