Opportunities

Conferences »

The First Colorado Celebration of Women in Computing (CCWIC) April 4-5th at the Hotel Boulderado in Boulder, Colorado Conference Flyer CCWIC is a unique opportunity for professionals and students from Colorado and neighboring states to meet and share experiences and strategies for success. The main goal of CCWIC is to encourage the research and career interests of local women in computing.

CCWIC will provide a low-cost, regional, small conference for women in computing (especially students) who do not have funding to attend major conferences. Like the national Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, CCWIC will include keynote lectures, opportunities for students to present technical talks and posters, informal networking, and a career fair. Industrial sponsors of CCWIC include ACM-W, Google, Sun Microsystems, LGS: Bell Labs Innovations, Accenture, and VMWare. Academic sponsors of CCWIC include Colorado School of Mines, University of Colorado at Boulder, and Colorado State University.

Past regional celebrations have shown that students, especially undergraduate students, need encouragement to attend. Please encourage your female students to attend, as the benefits these students will receive from attending are many.

Please also encourage your best students to participate in the celebration. The submission deadline is February 8th, and the early registration deadline is March 3rd.

For more details, see the CCWIC web site at: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/conference/ccwic/

Student Group»

Open Source Student Group

My name is Ben Meynell and I am in the midst of forming a student group called the "Open Source Group @ CU". The group's aim is to contribute to existing open source software projects as well as to create and administer our own projects. Frankly, I'm tired of seeing too many great solutions coming from students at Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and the like. I want to see CU to make a name for itself in this space.

As a student group, our office will be located in the UMC and the university will pay for our computers, chairs, desks, books, travel expenses, etc. It's a pretty sweet deal.

We want talented individuals passionate about developing quality open source software. Since our work will be published to a global audience, it's a good way to gain personal experience as well as a way garner a reputation for yourself in the "real world", once you leave school.

For starters, we will be writing plugins for the Symfony Project (a PHP-based website framework used by Yahoo! and others). We will also work with, and contribute to, the backend technologies developed by Danga Interactive: MogileFS (perl - distributed filesystem), Perlbal (perl - load balancer, webserver and reverse proxy), and Memached (c - stores files in RAM for fast retrieval instead of on disk). All these software products were developed by students and young people and now run behind the scenes on the web's most popular websites.

The scope of our work, however, will not be limited to the projects just listed. More generally, our focus will be on developing pragmatic technologies for websites that require high availability, scalability, speed, and quality code.

We will primarily make use of the following technologies: Linux, MySQL, Apache, PHP, Perl, Python, C, Java, Squid, CSS, XHTML, Flash, JavaScript, Subversion, Vim, etc. So, aptly, we're looking for individuals possessing those skills. And as already mentioned, the university will provide all the hardware, office space, etc. All you need to bring is your passion, talent, intelligence, creativity, and a desire to make changes and have a ton of fun.

Our in-office development methodology will be based on Extreme Programming practices. This means iterative development, writing short stories in English describing new features, writing test code before real code, not repeating any code, writing object oriented and modular code, refactoring, good documentation, code review sessions, etc.

As a student group, membership is voluntary and nobody will be compensated. However, if there turns out to be consulting demands on campus or beyond then we may be able to charge for our services. I'm also confident that we will come up with business ideas on our own that we could pursue outside of the group that could prove quite lucrative.

Stay tuned. There is no formal application at this time. If interested, PLEASE email Ben Meynell at bmeynell@colorado.edu.