geddski's comments

Hey thanks for sharing! Happy to answer any questions about it.

I wrote a post that might help anyone feeling overwhelmed about all the things to learn:

What Not to Learn http://gedd.ski/post/what-not-to-learn/

Not that's open source, but I can do a little write up article and share a sample app that shows how to do it.

I've been using RethinkDB for a while now and I really enjoy working with it. It's a great fit for React and Angular 2 apps with their one-way data flow through the application. Hook up a store or a model to an event source (server-sent events) that streams the RethinkDB changes feed and it's just awesome and simple. Realtime shouldn't be this easy, totally feels like cheating. Love it.

I also really like the ability to do joins, where before in Mongo I would have to handle data joins in the app level.

Cool, I think we'll start with that. Yeah, there's always the risk of "reverse discrimination" with any kind of effort like this. Will have to find the right balance. So far most of the early bird tickets (even more discounted) have gone to men just because of the current industry ratios, so I'm not too worried about them feeling bad.

You bet, and thank you. Better to take feedback now than have regrets later. Would changing the name of the ticket to the name of one of the official groups (Women in Tech Ticket, or Girl Develop It Ticket) and did all same lanyards (no pink!), would that be enough in your opinion?

I like the idea of naming the ticket after one of the organizations, maybe even having them be a sponsor. I'm taking notes, thanks for great ideas like this!

Those are great ideas, we'll definitely follow suite. Google is also providing complimentary childcare.

Hey everyone, I'm one of the organizers of ng-conf. We appreciate your feedback! Hopefully our genuine intent wasn't lost in our (perhaps clumsy) wording.

Our only goal with this is simple: promote the cause of women in tech. We all work with extremely talented women and recognize their value in our industry. For example where I work (Domo) one of our VP's just won the "Women in Tech" award, which is awesome. We just want the women in the Angular community to know that they're appreciated, needed, and welcome at ng-conf.

To that end, we wanted to make sure that those interested would have a ticket available. Today we sold all our early bird tickets in less than 2 minutes. Next week we are opening up the next round of discounted tickets for the general public. We anticipate these and all other tickets will also sell out quickly. So to succeed in our goal - despite the inevitable statistics - we decided to reserve a number of these tickets for women. This way, women that wanted to attend wouldn't have to worry about the luck of the Eventbrite draw. So the primary benefit is the guarantee (not the discount) of the ticket. We felt that was the least we could do to show our thanks and appreciation.

The pink lanyard does seem a bit silly out of context, we should have explained that idea better. As we've seen with other conferences with limited availability (JSConf, Google I/O, etc.) competition for a ticket can become intense. We didn't want men to buy up all the women's tickets using their significant other's name, or the whole thing would be pointless. We figured if the lanyard was clearly for women, that would deter most abuse of the initiative.

We really do appreciate the feedback on our execution. Let me recap what we're received so far:

- Most generally agree with the idea that getting more women out to ng-conf is a worthwhile initiative. - Pink lanyards was a terrible idea. - Some prefer to be referred to as women, not girls. That's understandable. We took our cues from some of the organizations championing this same cause: "Girl Develop It", "Girl's Who Code", "Black Girls Code", "Girls Write Now", etc. In our minds it was "guys and girls", not "boys and girls". Both are valid semantics of the word, but we hear you.

This has been a great learning experience, and it's clear that we need to brainstorm this a bit more. If you have other ideas that accomplish the same goals in a less polarizing fashion we're all ears. Thanks for the positive feedback, we appreciate it. We really want to do this right - it's too important not to. Thanks!

Dave Geddes @geddski

Thanks for being willing, we'll let you know.

Too soon to say for sure, but we'll try to make that happen.

We're really excited about this, and so is the Angular team. It's gonna be sweet.