The Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) is the largest conference in the world focused on women and underrepresented groups in technology. Named after the iconic Computer Scientist pioneer, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, this event, organized by AnitaB.org, brings together thousands of technology professionals to celebrate diversity, learn, and inspire. GHC provides a platform for networking, learning, and career advancement, featuring keynotes, workshops, and panels led by industry leaders, researchers, and professionals. In 2024, GHC brought together over 30,000 women and underrepresented individuals, making it an unmatched platform for innovation, pushing boundaries, and career development.

Open Source Reception

Sam and I (Cassie) both proudly represented Diagrid and the Dapr open source community at the GHC Open Source Reception. I took the stage to share my personal journey working on the Dapr OSS team at Diagrid as a key contributor to Dapr, highlighting the open source ecosystem's role in fostering inclusivity and collaboration. Our presence underscores Diagrid’s commitment to building a welcoming, diverse open source community, furthering opportunities for networking and engagement.

Workshop

The sessions at Grace Hopper Celebration 2024 covered a large variety of topics including thought leadership, technical and non technical workshops, and panel discussions.

Together, we took the stage for their first ever conference talk together, where we conducted a dynamic workshop titled Spike Your Application Development Skills with Dapr, a nod to our personal upbringing — a volleyball inspired theme that anchored the event.

In this hands-on workshop, attendees built a volleyball game using microservice architecture, exploring Dapr’s powerful APIs to publish/subscribe to events, save state, invoke services, and more. The session introduced attendees to the benefits of Dapr in simplifying complex distributed systems, with both of us actively guiding participants through the process. By the end, attendees had gained new skills in Go, microservices, and distributed application development. They also got a few new Dapr stickers as a workshop attendee perk!

The talks were all recorded, and will be uploaded to the GHC website shortly. Workshops were one of the only talk types not recorded. Some of the many sessions that we enjoyed:

- Mastering Concurrency in Go: This deep dive into Go’s concurrency model had us captivated. The hands-on workshop walked attendees through designing and implementing a concurrency-focused system for a simulated Uber Eats delivery service. The practical nature of the session was both informative and fun. This talk can be found here.

- Platform Engineering Playbook: A Kafka Journey: Target shared its transformative journey in managing Kafka as a platform in a hybrid cloud environment. This talk was particularly inspiring, as it demonstrated how Target was able to reduce platform maintenance time by 70% while cutting production issues in half. We came away with actionable insights on scaling and optimizing cloud-based platforms and Kafka. This talk can be found here.

- Community Lounge: Texas Communities: In between workshops and sessions, we made sure to connect with fellow Texans in the Texas Communities Lounge. This space, part of GHC's broader community lounge offerings, allowed for personal networking and exchanges with professionals from their home state. It also underscored the value of the AnitaB.org Local Communities, reminding everyone of the local meetups happening year-round in cities across the U.S.

Conclusion

Grace Hopper Celebration 2024 was an overwhelming success, both for Diagrid and for the thousands of women and underrepresented individuals who attended. The positive reception of our workshop demonstrated Diagrid’s growing influence in fostering innovation and diversity within the tech community. The learnings and connections made during this event are just the beginning.

As Diagrid continues to push the boundaries of cloud-native technology and open source collaboration, we look forward to future Grace Hopper Celebrations. Stay tuned for more updates and excitement as we continue to support the tech community, one connection at a time.

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