GHC '14 Opens Up with Open Source

The 2014 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is this week, October 8-10, in Phoenix, Arizona, with 8,000 attendees expected to converge on the annual event. Open source skills can give you a big advantage in the tech industry, so it's fitting that GHC '14 kicks off with a bunch of open source action.

According to Priyanka Sarkar in a recent article on OpenSource.com, FOSS Skills That Will Get You Hired This Year, candidates with OpenStack, web and mobile app development, and programming experience, for example, are in demand. These are a few of the areas that will be covered in Wednesday's Grace Hopper Open Source Day, which includes a Code-a-thon for Humanity as attendees pick up new (or improve current) open source skills. Registered code-a-thon attendees can choose to work with participating organizations, such as OpenStack. In the OpenStack workshop, for example, attendees with basic familiarity with SSH clients get a crash course in cloud computing, OpenStack, and how OpenStack is used in humanitarian apps.

In addition to the open source-focused workshops, GHC will have 101 Sessions this year, which are introductions for people who have little or no experience in open source. Pre-registration for 101 Sessions isn't required, but it's first come, first served if you want to learn about the Chromium browser, FreeBSD, GitHub, the Linux Foundation, and OpenHatch.

If you're attending GHC '14, be sure to swing by the Red Hat booth in the career fair. See the career fair guide(pdf) for the booth map, which you're going to need because there are lots of great booths to visit (Red Hat is booth #404).

If you can't attend GHC '14 in person, you can attend in spirit via the Live stream of keynotes and plenary events, see updates from the action on the blog roll, and keep an eye on the official conference tweets by following #ghc14. See the GHC Community Hashtags page for a list of hashtags for specific sessions, too.

Check back here for reports and follow @redhatopen on Twitter for updates from the 2014 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.