My First Grace Hopper Celebration

Cloudflare #GHC18 team

I am 25+ years into my career in technology, and this was the very first time I attended a conference geared towards women.

A couple of weeks ago I went to Grace Hopper Celebration (#GHC18), and I can still feel the exuberant energy from the 22,000 women over the intensive 3 day conference. I attended with our Cloudflare team; our purpose was to connect with women in the greater tech community and recruit new talent to join our team and mission to help build a better Internet.

Cloudflare prioritizes GHC because we recognize that diversity in our company, and particularly in our technical departments, is crucial to our success. We believe that the best companies are diverse companies. This was Cloudflare’s second time sponsoring GHC, and I was part of the planning committee. This year I headed to the event with 20 of my colleagues to meet all of the incredible attendees, hold on-site interviews, and even host our own Cloudflare panel and luncheon.

Getting to #GHC18

Early Tuesday morning, the day before the conference, as I joined the Southwest Airlines boarding line at Oakland Airport, my fellow passengers were not the usual contingent of Continue reading